It was tried. Ask the 6 million Jews who died.
Possibly. My measure is simple. What are the odds you’ll be shuttled off to the gulag if you criticize the government under a system?
Communist/socialist: better than average.
Fascist: 100%
Capitalist: highly unlikely.
Woosh!
Chile under Pinochet? Cuba under Batista? Argentina under the last junta, when Martínez de Hoz was Minister of the Economy?
There have been a whole lot of countries whose standard procedure is to prohibit criticism of the government. Some of them have been capitalist, some of them have been socialist, it’s not possible to come up with an easy correlation.
But countries like those, where politics is out of bounds, are much less dangerous than the totalitarian countries where no non-state organizations are permitted to exist, where the rule is “everything within the state, nothing outside the state”. These are the truly terrifying systems, and there have only been a few. The Third Reich, and most Communist states. (I say “most” because the role of the Catholic Church in the fall of the Warsaw Pact governments cannot be denied).
I think that was @Loudoun_Hillbilly’s point.
No respectable human advocates that we give Nazism another try to “see if it can be done humanely” this time.
Lots of people think we should give Marxism another try, though. The no true Scotsman fallacy is strong in them, ever so strong.
What he said.
Those examples are valid. However, I can produce counter examples. The US, Canada, UK, Australia, India, Mexico (generally), Germany, France, etc…
I honestly can’t think of any counter examples for fascist/socialist/communist nations.
I did not mind your original comment. In fact, I kind of liked having it there. Please feel free to un-edit it.
The but it’s also entirely true that the totalitarian governments are not exactly what Marx had in mind at all. The proletariat was never in charge, the party was. It’s disingenuous to compare the two considering that Nazism was a very specific ideology that got much further in carrying out it’s intended goals. Hitler had the theories and he had a state to do it with. Marx died in poverty and had little control over even his own life. And aside from the communist manifesto, much of his written work was aimed at describing the world (despite his own missive about changing the world). Like it or not, Das Kapital is still one of the best descriptions of how capitalism actually functions as an economic system, and it’s part of why we think of economics in the way we do today.
Aside from that Marxist THEORY is different from the implementation of a political and economic system. Marx never implemented shit, basically, and others, looking to take power, did. Given that stalin had a habit of constantly changing the meaning of marxist thought, it’s pretty clear that he didn’t care much about some implementation of anything Marx had actually said. He cared about holding onto power.
African Americans and Native Americans in the US, First peoples in Canada, Aboriginal people in Australia, etc.
And therein my point is made. Marx opens the door to Mao. For all of capitalism’s flaws and excesses, they arise from the basic state of mankind – greed, avarice, etc. It is truly an organic system of corruption.
Marx’s theories, however, are wholly synthetic. They do not exist in man’s nature. Thus one can lay the evils done in their name firmly at Marx’s doorstep (though I am quite open to argument on this point).
One cannot argue that Marx’s theories have never been truly implemented without admitting that Marxist thought indeed paves the way for horrors like the Killing Fields.
The system is telling me to let other people talk, so I will read for a while so as not to monopolize the conversation.
And if it hadn’t been Marx, it would have been someone else. It’s about power, not necessarily political theory. Do you throw Christanity out the window because some people used it to justify slavery and genocide? No, because we’re fully aware that many Christians aren’t racist or genocidal, but actually try and follow the teachings of Christ regarding their fellow man. Bayard Rustin isn’t Christopher Columbus.
Everything is a social construct. Capitalism, too. It doesn’t exist in nature.
I totally agree with that. But I take it as a warning.
The real problem in practice is likely more Lenin than Marx. Every “vanguard of the working class” which takes power becomes a permanent, oppressive kleptocracy. I do not think there is a counter example.
But every one of those states claims Marx as their inspiration. No Marxist government that I am aware of has ever made a transition to political democracy. So I don’t think it is unreasonable not to want to let avowed Marxists near the levers of power.
What about all of the people who die literally every day because of capitalism? What about the people who are dying of thirst right now because Nestle bought their source of water from their country’s corrupt government and is selling something to them at a 1000% markup that used to just be free? What about the people who die in the US for easily preventable reasons simply because they ran out of money?
What you, and a great many of others are doing, is conflating socialism and communism with the sins of the Soviet Union. You ignore every mitigating factor, you ignore how incongruent so much of those regimes were with Marxist thought, and basically everything else that doesn’t “prove” your point. Then there’s the fact that quite a lot of communist countries have been assailed non-stop by European/American interference. The regimes that weren’t going to collapse due to corruption, faced constant assault, interference, and attempted displacement by groups funded, trained, and supplied by the US/Europe because those groups promised to give the US/Europe better trade deals.
Meanwhile you give capitalism carte blanche to fail over, and over, and over again blaming each one on this technicality, or that externality, or some other hair-thin excuse for what is ultimately a system that is fundamentally unsustainable. Boiled down capitalism depends on two fundamentally contradictory things: infinite growth and scarcity. You can’t have both, you literally, mathematically, cannot have both.
Previous attempts at communism may not have worked, but they were at least attempts at finding a way to keep the human race going for the next thousand years. At the rate we’re going, we’ll be lucky to make it the next 250.
If you hate communism so much that you’re a supporter of absolutely unrestrained capitalism, you’re doing it wrong.
If you hate absolutely unrestrained capitalism so much that you’re a supporter of communism, you’re doing it wrong, too.
I point you to my Christianity example above. Christians have committed acts of violence based on their believe that God was on their side. Do we condemn all practitioners of Christianity?
Marx’s work provided a means to understand an economic system, the positives (destruction of the land aristrocracy and that class system, the invention of mass production, freeing people from traditional relationships, etc) and the negatives (endless accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, exploitation of people whose only thing to sell is their labor, bad working conditions, pushing all forms of social relations through a market instead of it being between individuals, etc). There is value in understanding that. Almost all positive changes that have happened in the capitalist system to make it less inhumane (which it very much is, actually - we are not all widgets to be sold or equipment to be used), have happened because people understood themselves to be part of some class of people who were being exploited in some manner, usually through the capitalist system, and they joined together with others to make those changes.
