Yep, and a lot of those changes have taken place in countries like the USA, Britain, post-Nazi Germany, South Korea, and many others. I’m totally fine with those changes.
I’m still not fine with anyone who wants to use Marxism as a political platform, because it’s never worked out well for anyone but the party cadre.
(Edit) My political POV can best be characterized as “JFK Democrat”.
Everyone pictures themselves being inside the party cadre, not inside a mass grave. Problem is that there is always room in the graves, while the party has limited occupancy.
… and your guess why people do make this difference is…?
Unless you’ve got a considerably more detailed explanation, I’m going to have to take your comment at face value: words that sound good, but ultimately mean nothing. “Unrestrained capitalism” and “communism” aren’t equidistant points from some hypothetical middle.
Folksy “split the difference” comments may read well, but they rarely contribute anything useful to the discussion. In this case, you’ve used a bunch of words to basically say, “I’m an economic neoliberal.”
See, how is it exactly people are blaming capitalism for this?
The places where this is going on is because they are poor. Whether those countries are socialist, communist, capitalist, or a hybrid wouldn’t matter because they don’t have the money to provide the infrastructure, food, medicine etc. You didn’t see the Soviets providing humanitarian aid except for the various communist puppet states, and even then, it was limited what they could do.
Though on the flip side, to be fair, most of the deaths caused by communism had more to do with creating a totalitarian state, than communism. BUT, there were several famines caused or exacerbated by communist control of farm land and then really shit implementation of farming methods.
Which is not what I said.
I was saying that Marxism-Leninism was never the only way communism could happen. Books like Left Communism: An Infantile Disorder would not have been written if that were the case.
And I haven’t even started talking about the various forms of anarchist communism.
And just for fun:
Acts 4:32-37
The Believers Share Their Possessions32 All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.
33 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all
34 that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales
35 and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.36 Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means “son of encouragement”),
37 sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles’ feet.
Take that and The Sermon on the Mount and you have the start of Christian Socialism, which tends to be pacifistic.
Throw in
25 In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.
and you have the roots of Christian Anarchism too, with the same tendencies towards pacifism.
Except that what seems to have worked best just about all the time is a non centralized, marketplace supply and demand approach to producing and delivering goods and services - along with strong worker protections and a sufficient social safety net.
Maybe that means I’m one of those despised moderates. I can live with the label.
Insufficient grounding in history.
Paradoxically, left communist movements seem to have been permitted to exist only within capitalist nations.
“Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.” --Pterry Pratchett (Solid Jackson, Jingo)
The problem, of course, is that Nazism is a totalitarian, nationalistic system that hinges entirely around the notion that a single, pretty loosely defined group of people is inherently superior to everyone else. Every single goddamned thing the Nazis did was in an effort to “prove” that hypothesis, that’s why (contrary to popular belief) nearly all of the supposed “medical research” done by the Nazis is useless–it wasn’t meant to be science, it was propaganda and self-justification.
Socialism, and ultimately communism are built around the idea of society being classless and stateless–in other words, direct democracy that is not controlled, governed, or valued by money.
The two aren’t even remotely close to the same thing, and the fact that you’re comparing them as though they were equal feels either insincere or rooted in ignorance. (Or a combination thereof)
And neoliberals like to imagine themselves as millionaires, as opposed to struggling to get by on what amounts to slave wages.
I’m not here to label people, but what you’re describing isn’t being moderate. I’m not saying you can’t split the difference because it has to be some extreme or another, I’m saying that you can’t split the difference because the two points you’re ostensibly trying to pass between don’t actually share an axis–they’re built on fundamentally different principles, and have very different goals.
You’ve basically suggested that we split the difference between a road and a car.
And that’s often not unrelated to captialism in and of itself. The extraction of manpower and resources from what we deem to be undeveloped countries to industrial cores was part and parcel of the impoverishment of many undeveloped countries.
Gonna have to check you here but historically capitalism is a wholly modern affair. If anything, command economies have existed for far longer than international market economies, especially if you take in the Bronze Age civilizations who were 100% top-down command economies. And they lasted the longest until our modern civilizations. I make a distinction from local market economies since they’re the result of neglect by the state so non-state actors fill the void for better or worse. Whereas international markets were/are actively constructed by merchants and “venture capitalists.” To say capitalism would naturally occur is not really accurate considering the facts of human history as known today.
That is absolutely a fair criticism of my point, which I failed to articulate clearly. When I said capitalism arises from nature, I mean the forces that motivate it arise from the natural state of man. Greed is the seed which grows into the capitalist tree.
No so for communism. Communism is synthetic in that it grows from an idea that is antithetical to nature – voluntary cooperation that often leads to the detriment of the individual.
The problem is that no human being can resist the temptation of absolute power, whether he seeks it from the beginning (Hitler) or it seduces him once in control (Lenin).
No communism in practice has ever been stateless or classless, or even as stateless or classless as many capitalist states. Show me one that has been so.
That’s why I keep returning to the no true Scotsman fallacy. And there’s this problem too:
Greed is also the seed which causes humanity to rape, pillage, and steal from one another. Greed is not something to be celebrated.
Working together for the betterment of all is something to work towards and is just as “natural” as greed. In fact, when you see a disaster happen, often, you will see human beings going forward to help others (not everyone, but many ordinary people). If greed were our natural state, we sure as hell wouldn’t help others in times of distress and we do. Helping others isn’t detrimental to the individual. It helps the individual grow and become a more empathetic person.
The anarchist bits of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War?
Rojava?
