The problem with communism...

[Pens1566]

Have you ever contributed anything of value to P&N? Ever? I'm just asking because I've never seen you post anything more interesting or insightful than what a six year old with a link to RNC.org could produce.

Rhetorical question, amirite?

 

[Steeplerot]

Frankly, an ideology that has directly claimed the lives of millions doesn't require many clues to understand. It speaks not to my idiocy but to yours that you should defend it.

Communism has nothing on how many people starve to death/killed over resources in the world so a fractionally small percentage can get rich. If you wish to do a bodycount in that foolishly generalized way we can go there.

How many people did the Dutch kill in the Congo for $$$? Pretty damn close to Stalin's bodycount itself, native Americans in USA? Pol Pot would weep with his mass killing noobness, The British empire in India? Mass carnage. Millions. I could go on, and on and on. Many still die of starvation daily, while Capitalists proudly scrape food into their trash and poo-poo starving in the world arrogantly. I would not go down that road, all ideaologies have very dirty hands if you wish to blame an ideology instead of actual events or leaders. it shows how little historical knowledge you have. Also the "black book of communism" you guys use for your statistics uses straight up German propaganda from....*drum roll* Nazi Germany. In other words you guys are defending Capitalism by using Fascist propaganda not having a damn clue where your information comes from out of either ignorance or partisanship. Lame.

 

[SamurAchzar]

Communism can never work because it's against the human nature. We're achievers, want to amass power, fortune and control. That's the way we are, that's why many people strive to learn and have careers instead of having a job that you can just get by on.

When you "want out" of a capitalistic society you can become homeless. When you "want out" of a communist society, you become an enemy of the regime. What Mr. Red doesn't understand that even if we can't really define human desires and aspirations, it's enough to have a group of people that are power-hungry, capable and intelligent for the communist system to either collapse or become a dictatorship.

There isn't even one case of communism working, be it on the corporate level (unions), collective level (like the Israeli kibbutz) or state level. It is a pathetic attempt to reeducate and deprive aspirations.

 

[Moonbeam]

True. I probably posted this in too much zeal, but it's infuriating that union members feel entitled to benefits to this extent.

Of course you don't see how absurd this statement is because you have an entitlement mentality. You feel entitled, ignorant and programmed though you are, to have an opinion even though it is nothing but garbage.

The French working class aren't protesting because they feel entitled. What they feel is the injustice being done to them. They are the folk who will need these benefits and they are the folk who are being asked to sacrifice. The simple alternative is to raise taxes on the rich but that would cause protest too because, naturally, the rich also feel entitled to be rich. Why do you think it always works out that the poorest in society get the shaft. It couldn't be that money buys power. No you are way way too smart to think that. Hehehehehe

Better start baking those French folk some cake.

 

[xj0hnx]

And? You don't think that's arrogant as well?

Although saying "These people have got some nerve." seems a bit OTT.

And the OP seems to be criticizing people for wanting a say in the ruling of their own country.

Not so much arrogant as ...irrelevant. Having an opinion isn't the same thing as trying to tell someone how to run their country. I was simply pointing out that he wasn't telling them how to run their country, or even offering his opinion on how they should run their country, merely stating his opinion about how they are running their country.

 

[WelshBloke]

Not so much arrogant as ...irrelevant. Having an opinion isn't the same thing as trying to tell someone how to run their country. I was simply pointing out that he wasn't telling them how to run their country, or even offering his opinion on how they should run their country, merely stating his opinion about how they are running their country.

He seems to think they are arrogant for wanting some say in how their country is run, that they should just suck it up and do what their told.

That seems pretty arrogant to me.

 

[Steeplerot]

Communism can never work because it's against the human nature. We're achievers, want to amass power, fortune and control. That's the way we are, that's why many people strive to learn and have careers instead of having a job that you can just get by on.

When you "want out" of a capitalistic society you can become homeless. When you "want out" of a communist society, you become an enemy of the regime. What Mr. Red doesn't understand that even if we can't really define human desires and aspirations, it's enough to have a group of people that are power-hungry, capable and intelligent for the communist system to either collapse or become a dictatorship.

There isn't even one case of communism working, be it on the corporate level (unions), collective level (like the Israeli kibbutz) or state level. It is a pathetic attempt to reeducate and deprive aspirations.

The same excuse "it is human nature"?

Every one of those tinpot dictators were let or Capitalists manipulated take over.

Check this out: Communist dictator history time!

Lenin - and thus his buddy Stalin - Smuggled into Russia in a secret armored railroad car by imperial Germany during WW1 from his exile in Switzerland to sow dissent into Russia who the Kaiser was fighting a war against. Lenin moves in and takes ALL worker rights away from the actual Soviet councils who fought for freedom. His right hand man takes over Lenin's position after a capitalist's assassination attempt that mortally wounds Lenin, Stalin takes over in what is literally a bloody coup of intimidation and assassination. We know the dark part of Russian history that happened after. Stalin also killed just about everyone of the actual Socialists who fought in the revolution to free workers in 1917.

I want to write one about Mao and Pol Pot and the manipulations of worldwide capitalism that helped them into power also, there is a LOT of the story not being told thanks to the cold war education here. Will edit soon (today is a busy day here).

 

[werepossum]

The same excuse "it is human nature"?

Every one of those tinpot dictators were let or Capitalists manipulated take over.

Check this out: Communist dictator history time!

Lenin - and thus his buddy Stalin - Smuggled into Russia in a secret armored railroad car by imperial Germany during WW1 from his exile in Switzerland to sow dissent into Russia who the Kaiser was fighting a war against. Lenin moves in and takes ALL worker rights away from the actual Soviet councils who fought for freedom. His right hand man takes over Lenin's position after a capitalist's assassination attempt that mortally wounds Lenin, Stalin takes over in what is literally a bloody coup of intimidation and assassination. We know the dark part of Russian history that happened after. Stalin also killed just about everyone of the actual Socialists who fought in the revolution to free workers in 1917.

I want to write one about Mao and Pol Pot and the manipulations of worldwide capitalism that helped them into power also, there is a LOT of the story not being told thanks to the cold war education here. Will edit soon (today is a busy day here).

Since you're so busy I'll give you a time-saving tip. The time you spend arranging letters into actual words is not actually making your posts more coherent. Although I will admit that your "Stalin the capitalist plant" theory is good for a laugh.

 

[SamurAchzar]

If by "Capitalism" you refer to the will of the individual to gain capital, then yes, you're right, but then again that's just what I'm saying - that human beings are like this to their core.

Now, unions have demonstrated what happens when you let the working class manage itself. Lets assume GM was transferred to UAW control, how would it look then?

 

[Steeplerot]

How very ironic, The Labor unions are not socialist. The unions were brutally oppressed by the capitalist government since WW1. (mass arrests, jailings etc) The last actual Socialist union in the USA was forcibly smashed in 1916 or so (the IWW) the rest are bought and paid for by capitalists. Take a look at what the AFL pulled on the Socialist party and Eugene Debs during WW1, it is scandalous and showed who owned them.

 

[PJABBER]

Also the "black book of communism" you guys use for your statistics uses straight up German propaganda from....*drum roll* Nazi Germany. In other words you guys are defending Capitalism by using Fascist propaganda not having a damn clue where your information comes from out of either ignorance or partisanship. Lame.

"The Black Book of Communism", or Le livre noir du Communisme, a French work, is an interesting and common reference, but is not the sole source of information, as you well know.

There are many instances of democide, which is defined as genocide by government, but the focus here can reasonably be limited to the 20th and 21st centuries, the most recent periods. Go too far back and you have no detailed written record and the numbers become inferences. The communists and the fascists were pretty good at keeping track of their work, so we can get a better accounting there.

There are all kinds of scholarly books to peruse, but let me offer up a DVD reference that captures much of the import. Like most documentaries it does emphasize one aspect over another in addressing a general audience, but the whole here is greater than the parts -

The Soviet Story

Pray tell, my brother,
Why do dictators kill and make war?
Is it for glory; for things, for beliefs, for hatred, for power?
Yes, but more, because they can.

 

[Steeplerot]

Although I will admit that your "Stalin the capitalist plant" theory is good for a laugh.

The train pulling into Petragrad holding Lenin in secret armored compartment snuck across Germany into hostile Russia in the middle of WW1.


Q: How and why did Lenin return to Russia in April 1917?

A: Lenin was isolated in neutral Switzerland during the beginning of World War I after the 1905 Revolution. After receiving news of the February 1917 Revolution in Russia, he wanted to return there immediately to give instructions to the Bolsheviks about how to continue with the revolution and to defeat the Provisional Government. A Swiss Communist convinced the German government to send Lenin safely to Russia on a sealed train. The German government hoped that Lenin would provoke political unrest in his homeland, forcing Russia to surrender to the Germans, which would allow Germany to pull troops away from the Eastern Front to focus on the war in the Western Front.

Typical capitalist divide and conquer. Along with letting the far-right wing of the Bolsheviks back into Russia to create dissent (and oh did he!) Lenin immediately called for his right hand man and main thug who was imprisoned in a Gulag at the time in Siberia. Enter Stalin, he makes his way back west to meet Lenin to once again start a terrorist streak across Russia. But this time they got handed the keys to the whole country, and even worse: the trust of the Russian workers, who got put up against the wall for trusting Lenin and Stalin with the working classes revolution from Czarist tyranny. Once the Germans assassinated Rosa Luxembourg in Berlin the chance of Socialism died for that time period. Soon Stalin took over, instead of Democratic based Luxembourgian Socialism for Germany they got National Socialism foisted upon them by another certain thug using Socialism's name to sow dissent on the workers. (see a pattern here?)


All this is common WW1 history people usually learn in middle school. (or at least I did)

In reality all that got set up in the Soviet Union was State Capitalism, the capitalist class STILL "owned" and ran the factories, and got even sweeter hookups from the government, in the form of slave labor. The capitalist classes wet dream! IF you look at big industry in Russia to this day the same families are running big industry. So don't give us this shit that "Communism" killed folks in Russia. Capitalism/Imperialism driven by profit under the guise of a workers revolution and the almighty dollar (ruble) once again motivated people. That is if you actually read history.


Fascinating history going on back then in WW1/Russia. There was a American from Portland, OR lucky enough to be over there while Lenin had his Oct Revolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Days_that_Shook_the_World
It won tons of awards back then, a VERY good read from a American PoV of what was happening those 10 days in Petragrad that changed WW1 and the whole world, even until today.

Since the cold war a lot of this is repressed.

 

[soulcougher73]

America bitches about it.
France does something about it.

WTG France.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

The French are strange.



That is, of course, not to say that Americans are perfectly normal, either.

 

[Moonbeam]

America bitches about it.
France does something about it.

WTG France.

Yup, they seem not to be trained to accept being fucked in the ass. I suggest the folk who have power promise to work till 90 and at half pay. Lead by example.

 

[Steeplerot]

Thanks, but I don't need nazi literary recommendations. Sick you guys give a pass to using straight up Nazi lies.

But if it fits your agenda. I for one never want to hear you bitch about "liberal rags" like NY Times.

Heres a little dirty secret about that little black book, a lot of the "deaths by famine" are genocide from AUstra-Hungarian empire and Germany. A little thing called pogroms. Where they round up Jews and slaughtered them all over Ukraine. If you listen to the Black Books sources they blame.....*drum roll* Bolsheviks. Guess where this rumor came from? Joesph Goebbels himself!

Problem with right-wing history is reality has a liberal bias of course, and these new-school US conservatives have very little history to relate to, besides nazism. Not saying this for a strawman, the tea party stuff is straight up 1930 right-wing subversion and tactics.

That is if you read those dusty old history books from back then, instead of Glenn Beck's revisionist blackboard based off of creepy-ass sources like this black book.

 

[ConstipatedVigilante]

Yup, they seem not to be trained to accept being fucked in the ass. I suggest the folk who have power promise to work till 90 and at half pay. Lead by example.

They don't accept being fucked in the ass? They just don't accept having their entitlements taken away in the interest of keeping their country's head above water. Do you know why Europe plummeted? No one there is willing to work. Over there, they literally take at least a month off during the year, in addition to the major holidays we have here.

 

[WelshBloke]

They don't accept being fucked in the ass? They just don't accept having their entitlements taken away in the interest of keeping their country's head above water.

Their country, their entitlements, their choice. Feel free to impotently whine about it though.

Do you know why Europe plummeted? No one there is willing to work. Over there, they literally take at least a month off during the year, in addition to the major holidays we have here.

Hey it works for Germany.

 

[Steeplerot]

"The Black Book of Communism", or Le livre noir du Communisme, a French work, is an interesting and common reference, but is not the sole source of information, as you well know.

There are many instances of democide, which is defined as genocide by government, but the focus here can reasonably be limited to the 20th and 21st centuries, the most recent periods. Go too far back and you have no detailed written record and the numbers become inferences. The communists and the fascists were pretty good at keeping track of their work, so we can get a better accounting there.

There are all kinds of scholarly books to peruse, but let me offer up a DVD reference that captures much of the import. Like most documentaries it does emphasize one aspect over another in addressing a general audience, but the whole here is greater than the parts -

The Soviet Story

Pray tell, my brother,
Why do dictators kill and make war?
Is it for glory; for things, for beliefs, for hatred, for power?
Yes, but more, because they can.

Like I said, lets get past that this book relies on Nazi figures from the third reichs propaganda department if you want to count bodies and blame those deaths on ideology in this strawman way then Capitalism is responsible for the deaths of all starving children. Right now. Worldwide.

There is no need for people to starve in 2010, except Capitalism needs to keep the elites rich.

Makes Stalin look like a kitten -and I don't mean my old user icon.


The black book is NOT a common reference, that is unless you count rants on stormfront and neo-nazi sites, and of course foxnews pundits.

 

[PJABBER]

Like I said, lets get past that this book relies on Nazi figures from the third reichs propaganda department if you want to count bodies and blame those deaths on ideology in this strawman way then Capitalism is responsible for the deaths of all starving children. Right now. Worldwide.

There is no need for people to starve in 2010, except Capitalism needs to keep the elites rich.

Makes Stalin look like a kitten -and I don't mean my old user icon.

The black book is NOT a common reference, that is unless you count rants on stormfront and neo-nazi sites, and of course foxnews pundits.

Like I said, there are any number of scholarly researched texts that an interested reader can reference and I list just a few of them in an above post.

The Black Book of Communism, at 912 pages length, is heavily based on the official archive documents that were discovered after the fall of the Soviet government. Each of the contributing scholars is either a former communist or close fellow traveler.

Here are some of the reviews from stormfront and neo-nazi sites of the English language edition. Unfortunately, I can't find the Fox News pundit comments and have never heard the text mentioned at any time on Fox. Then again, I don't watch it as religiously as you do.

“An 800-page compendium of the crimes of Communist regimes worldwide, recorded and analyzed in ghastly detail by a team of scholars. The facts and figures, some of them well known, others newly confirmed in hitherto inaccessible archives, are irrefutable. The myth of the well-intentioned founders--the good czar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs--has been laid to rest for good. No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism, and those who had begun to forget will be forced to remember anew.”—Tony Judt, New York Times

“When The Black Book of Communism appeared in Europe in 1997 detailing communism’s crimes, it created a furor. Scrupulously documented and soberly written by several historians, it is a masterful work. It is, in fact, a reckoning. With this translation by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, English-language readers may now see for themselves what all the commotion was about.”—Jacob Heilbrunn, Wall Street Journal

“The Black Book of Communism, which is finally appearing in English, is an extraordinary and almost unspeakably chilling book. It is a major study that deepens our understanding of communism and poses a philosophical and political challenge that cannot be ignored. The book’s central argument, copiously documented and repeated in upwards of a dozen different essays, is that the history of communism should be read above all as the history of an all-out assault on society by a series of conspiratorial cliques led by cruel dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim II Sung, Pol Pot, and dozens of imitators) who were murderously drunk on their own ideology and power... Courtois and his collaborators have performed a signal service by gathering in one volume a global history of communism’s crimes from the Soviet Union to China, from the satellite countries of Eastern-Europe to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and North Korea, and to a lesser degree in Latin America and Africa...The Black Book is enormously impressive and utterly convincing. ”—Michael Scammell, New Republic

“To the extent that the book has a literary style, it is that of the recording angel; this is the body count of a colossal, wholly failed social, economic, political and psychological experiment. It is a criminal indictment, and it rightly reads like one. ”—Alan Ryan, New York Times Book Review

“Most sensible adults are aware of communism’s human toll in the Soviet Union and elsewhere--the forced starvations in the Ukraine, the Great Purge of the 1930s, the Gulag, the insanity of China’s Great Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s murder of one in every seven Cambodians, Fidel Castro’s firing squads and prisons. All these horrors are now brought together in what the French scholar Martin Mali, in his foreword, calls a ’balance sheet of our current knowledge of communism’s human costs, archivally based where possible and elsewhere drawing on the best available secondary evidence’...The book is all the more damning because each of the contributing scholars is either a former communist or close fellow traveler...That The Black Book infuriated the French left is a sure mark of its intrinsic worth. ”—Joseph C. Goulden, Washington Times

“The Black Book is a groundbreaking effort by a group of French scholars to document the human costs of Communism in the 20th century. Its publication caused a sensation in France when it was first released in 1997, but Americans were not able to see for themselves what the furor was all about until October 1999, when Harvard University Press finally released an English translation. It was worth the wait. Taking advantage of many newly available archives in former Communist states, the authors (many of them former Communists themselves) have meticulously recorded the crimes, terror and repression inflicted by Communist regimes across the world. It is a powerful work.”—Mark A. Thiessen, National Review

“The authors of The Black Book of Communism are part of a welcome change in the moral-philosophical landscape in Paris, and one hopes elsewhere, as a result of which liberal and left-of-center intellectuals, scholars and politicians judge the crimes of communist regimes with the same severity they’ve applied to those of Nazism and fascism. ”—Jeffrey Herf, Washington Post Book World

“Arguing with the passion of former believers, [the contributors] charge that communism was a criminal system. They all make the case well. ”—Foreign Affairs

“Now The Black Book of Communism is available in English, thanks to a stellar edition from Harvard University Press that appeared late last year, with an excellent introduction by Martin Malia, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. ”—Stephen Goode, Insight

“This black book has been a best seller across Europe. It details all the misery inflicted by Communism throughout the world: 25 million dead in the Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia...Not a pleasant book, a necessary one. ”—David Sexton, Evening Standard

“A sober and balanced piece of work. [The Black Book of Communism] is particularly good on the origins of the Soviet police state under Lenin and on Stalin’s Great Terror. It should be read by anyone who still has illusions that the Bolshevik revolution was a good thing--and anyone who believes that something worthwhile was lost when the Berliners destroyed the Wall 10 years ago. ”—Paul Anderson, The Tribune

“A serious, scholarly history of Communist crimes in the Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Africa, and Latin America...The Black Book does indeed surpass many of its predecessors in conveying the grand scale of the Communist tragedy, thanks to its authors’ extensive use of the newly opened archives of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. ”—Anne Applebaum, Weekly Standard

“A generally even-toned and informative book, and one that will serve as a healthy dose of medication for those still afflicted by a wish to treat the Bolshevik revolution as a mistake, however monumental, or something that ’had to happen’...The Black Book’s guiding purpose is to cut through the dense tissue of apologetics that has been deployed in the communist interest, both those devised in the thick of repression and those added after the collapse. ”—Ben Webb, New Times

“The Black Book of Communism] consists of scholarly yet readable (and superbly translated) essays, some based on recently opened Soviet archives, and covers the communist revolutions in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, including Cuba...The Black Book [is] a most important volume of contemporary history produced by a group of French Sovietologists... On finishing this magnificent volume, it is impossible not to see that in three-quarters of a century Soviet communism had left nothing behind except death and destruction.”—Arnold Beichman, Weekend Post

“The heart of the Black Book is a compilation and description--in mesmerizing objective prose-- of the slaughters visited upon populations around the world by communist dictators in the 20th century...The Black Book is an elegantly simple and valuable record of a time many would like to forget--but will have to deal with.”—John Omicinski, Scottsdale Tribune

“I can’t think of any book that would be more important for Americans to read. If you are going to read only one book this year, make it The Black Book of Communism. This is an 800-page history of the terror, repression and killings of communism stretching from the Bolshevik Revolution to the present. Written by scholars who are ex-communists or former fellow travelers, the book establishes beyond doubt that communism is the greatest crime against humanity in the 20th century.”—Charley Reese, The Sentine

“An important scholarly achievement of exhaustive breadth based on new archival material from the Stalin era...This impressive and important book is well worth the price. ”—Zachary T. Irwin, Library Journal

“A unique attempt by French historians--as important in its way as the works of Solzhenitsyn--to chronicle the crimes of communism wherever it has attained power in the world. Not the least remarkable thing about this book is that this is the first time such a study has been made. For the cumulative toll of victims of communist rule, estimated by the authors at between 85 and 100 million, dwarfs even the crimes of the Nazis...A devastating and important book, already hailed in Europe, and the more harrowing for its sobriety. ”—Kirkus Reviews

“In France, this damning reckoning of communism’s worldwide legacy was a bestseller that sparked passionate arguments among intellectuals of the Left. Courtois, along with the other distinguished French and European contributors, delivers a fact-based, mostly Russia-centered wallop that will be hard to refute: town burnings, mass deportations, property seizures, family separations, mass murders, planned famines--all chillingly documented from conception to implementation. ”—Publishers Weekly

“In the end, the Black Book’s body counts--necessary as they are--are less important than the soul-destroying connections between Marxist idealism and the violence committed in its name. ”—Lawrence Osborne, salon.com

“The publishing sensation in France this winter (1999) has been an austere academic tome, Le Livre Noir du Communisme, detailing Communism’s crimes from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989...[The Black Book of Communism] gives a balance sheet of our present knowledge of Communism’s human costs, archivally based where possible, and otherwise drawing on the best secondary works, and with due allowance for the difficulties of quantification. Yet austere though this inventory is, its cumulative impact is overwhelming. At the same time, the book advances a number of important analytical points.”—Martin Malia, Times Literary Supplement​

 

[Steeplerot]

Your problem is you are stuck in a world of these scholarly right-wing think tanks.

It is like Reagan said, "They know so much that isn't so."

 

[PJABBER]

Your problem is you are stuck in a world of these scholarly right-wing think tanks.

It is like Reagan said, "They know so much that isn't so."

Your problem is that you are stuck in a world of communism as utopia rather than the killing field it really is.

It is like Stalin said,

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

Interview with H. G. Wells (September 1937)

 

[colonel]

Main problem in this thread is 2 things.

A lot of people here have no clue about Communism.

You guys keep speaking of lazy people in a communist society. Yet Communist societies have no unemployment.
(Unemployment is a optional element of a modern capitalist society to naturally drive down wages to benefit the capitalist class.)


You guys really should read some, you have quite a bit wrong, and it is odd, as none of what you are saying is common sense for a functional society to work. In other words you have been fed BS.



In the Soviet Constitution, Article Twelve states:

In the U.S.S.R. work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat."

The biggest fallacy I see (and the foundation of the conservative movement nowadays) is that Socialist societies are repressive to growth because everyone is equal. The elephant in the center of the room everyone has ignored about reality is that no Marxist-Leninist society has EVER been anything near what Marx proposed.

EVERY Communist "test run" tried since the day Marx penned the last words in the Manifesto has included:
A. A Cash-based scaled and tiered wage economy depending on ones type of labor
B. Bosses/Ruling classes who dictate their own needs over workers.
C. Profiteering by the State on the workers backs.

In other words: a State Capitalist society with a bit of capitalist welfare state tacked on in some cases.


Another misconception:

A lot of: "It is just human nature! <insert excuse here>" This is a excuse for intellectual laziness, or to dismiss the subject without further insight. (or plain manipulation by the ruling classes of society to keep themselves in power by dividing and conquering the people against one another so they can stay happy manipulated consumers) The "human nature" bit is a myth as all individuals have their own reasonings and situations they have built upon to come to where they are. If one thing about the human race is a immutable fact and got us to where we are is that humans work together. Not the opposite. (which is known as a disorder in modern society - a sociopath)

Ahh, but what about good old Randian greed? Problem with this is that self preservation comes out of necessity or need. How far one is willing to go for a "want" is a case by case basis. Most "wants" nowadays are manipulations by the capitalists through freudian mindfucking. (advertising based off of ones inner need for validation or acceptance.) -which is optional to a society. Public Relations and advertising firms do this for a living out in the open manipulating people into irrational wants which benefit the capitalist class by lowering the chance of overproduction of a commodity thus loss of profitability.)

We live in a world nowadays with technology where there is no excuse for hunger or want. Capitalism will kill us all one day if we do not "evolve" beyond where the ruling classes manipulate us to keep their power through outdated mindsets such as shown in this thread.

you are right, the close example of real Communism was in Spain in 1936 with Caballero and Rojo, since The Spanish Civil war was a clash of ideas o ideologies Communism/Fascism and also a test ground for the future of Europe.

 

[spittledip]

Communism would be great if people were less selfish and greedy. Of course, selfishness and greed are the weak points of a capitalistic and democratic system as well.

 

[PJABBER]

The way I see it, there is absolutely no difference between onerous communism, fascism, theocracy, monarchy or whatever other form of autocracy there might be.

The more authoritarian the governance, the more imminent the genocide. The more powerful the government, the more certain that it exists at the cost of untold lives.

It is only the extent of a society's constraint on the power of government that determines if it is free or not.

You can make every excuse under the sun about how the intent is of benefit to mankind but I still wind up looking at the body count and cursing the cause.