Split Thread What is Communism

[dann]

The posts from theprestige are usually nothing but philosophical brain farts based on no knowledge whatsoever about what he claims:

The news that Seattle is facing an even higher budget shortfall than expected, thus raising the spectre of an increased payroll tax to close the gap, got me thinking...
... and what it got me thinking is this: Payroll taxes are objectively Marxist.

The only time I hear people calling collective funding communism is when progressives try to tell me I'm a communist for believing taxation is a legitimate role of government.

Marxism has never been anti-imperialist, let alone typically so.
The goal is a global empire, a dictatorship of the proletariat. It's no accident the anthem is called "the Internationale".

When asked to back up his claims with receipts, he refuses to do so:

And I never am going to deliver to you "receipts" about Lenin's revolutionary communism.

Now he wants me to waste my time on this:

Sell us on actual communism. Let's see your pitch.

I'm not going to waste my time, but I will refer him and others – whether included in his "us" or not – to Karl Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, i.e. 27 years after The Communist Manifesto and eight years after the first volume of Das Kapital), one of the few texts where "Marx address[es] the dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition from capitalism to communism, the two phases of communist society, the production and distribution of the social goods, proletarian internationalism, and the party of the working class."

Enjoy!

 

[Trausti]

I'm not going to waste my time, but I will refer him and others – whether included in his "us" or not – to Karl Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, i.e. 27 years after The Communist Manifesto and eight years after the first volume of Das Kapital), one of the few texts where "Marx address[es] the dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition from capitalism to communism, the two phases of communist society, the production and distribution of the social goods, proletarian internationalism, and the party of the working class."

Enjoy!

Instead of theories and abstractions, and in light of the 150 years since Marx wrote that, could you give real world examples of communism and how well it worked?

 

[Trausti]

To me the essential element of communism, along with authoritarianism, is state planning, i.e., Gosplan, and little to no economic freedom. A state paying for schools and roads, or even "benefits," is not communism. But too much state regulation and spending - which some would call socialism - can lead to the same economic disincentives inherent in communism.

 

[theprestige]

The posts from theprestige are usually nothing but philosophical brain farts based on no knowledge whatsoever about what he claims:



When asked to back up his claims with receipts, he refuses to do so:

Now he wants me to waste my time on this:

I'm not going to waste my time, but I will refer him and others – whether included in his "us" or not – to Karl Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, i.e. 27 years after The Communist Manifesto and eight years after the first volume of Das Kapital), one of the few texts where "Marx address[es] the dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition from capitalism to communism, the two phases of communist society, the production and distribution of the social goods, proletarian internationalism, and the party of the working class."

Enjoy!

I accept that I'm probably wrong about some or all of what communism actually is.

But I didn't ask you for a reading list, or a hand-wave at what someone else says communism is on paper, or in theory.

I asked you what your idea of a practical implementation of communism would look like, in the real world, in a western country. Do you not have an idea of what that would look like?