: Don: What published sources?Reason for a start and all that other Hayekian garbage wrote by people who have never seen or spoken to a socialist never mind read any of their books and who collectively refer to everything that isnt their ideology as Facist (which in turn belittles the significance of that label and it's association with ultra violence and holocaust).
: Don: I know Libya isn't free.
That's funny they say they're free how do you they're not? I mean if a government says it's communist it has to be so why the sudden move of goal posts, oh, I see it is a different matter because Socialism is a great satan in your books and devoid of good arguments against it your going to play prejudiced cards and attempt to replace reasoned debate with dogma and propaganda.
:I have no reason to think that the USSR and the PRC were not genuine attempts at communism.
Well I'm a socialist/communist and there are many others here and they are all telling you it wasnt, and I believe, if I'm not wrong that you asked for book references once about communism and I doubt books wrote by communists would declare the bloody image your painting.
:The commies in Russia started off as a small group who happened to get lucky because of their opposition to involvement in WW1.
Perhaps I'll enlighten you seeing as I've got qualifications in the history of the Russian Revolution and Superpower Conflict. There was revolution in Russia that removed the oldest autocracys in the world (because people seen that it responsed to peaceful demonstrations asking for nothing more than peace, bread and fuedal land lordism with machine gunnings)and replaced it with a provisional government organised on a democratic pattern would have made Jefferson or Rousseu happy. The peasant Social Revolutionary Party who's over riding ideology was one of anarchism and direct action socialism, that is instinctive socialism/egalitarianism, was elected with a massive majority. Since peace had been declared Lenin was able to make it back from Germany in a train, by this stage he'd stopped believing in communism or socialism and believed in a bureaucrats dream of state capitalism. Now the republic was under attack from all the imperial or capitalist powers because the feared it was genuinely socialist and the SR's armed everyone to ensure it's defence. When the imperial forces where defeated the Bolsheviks lead by lenin wouldnt give the guns back and instead marched into the parliament and said that anyone who turned up tommorrow would be shot by the new Bolshevik dictatorship.
So they, the bolsheviks, didnt "get lucky" they crushed a potentially socialist administration and instituted the plans and control of Lenin a terrible centralist political and economic autocracy obsessed with maintain power for the party at all costs even if it meant corrupting socialism so that it was unrecognisable to any socialists.
:I have no reason to believe they were not well intentioned.
I've given you a reason but I'm probably lying again.
: Don: The family only bears a superficial relationship to communism. And even if families represented true communism, it's a huge logical leap to equate them with large political units.
Explain to me how it is a superficial relationship? I understand that it would be a huge leap I'm not a communist, I'm a Socialist I dont advocate a system based on from each according to their ability to each according to their self determined need, I advocate a system based on from each according to their ability to each according to their work/participation but never the less the family unit is a precedent and if it isnt communism it definitely isnt capitalism.
: Don: Strict limitations on the power of the government to control my life.
Fine that is consistant with Socialism or Communism, the real communists like Kropotkin advocate the abolition of government and it is hardly egalitarian to support governments they are a source of rank and privilege.
However they arent the only ones controlling your life, the state or government doesnt make you get up in the mornings, go to bed at night, work for someone elses interests etc. the market does, or lets have no illusions here the privately owned command economy does. While you can through participation in the democratic process reform government and place limitations on it's controlling capacity the likes of you advocates an order in which reforming the Privately Owned Command Economy (POCE) wont just be as difficult as now but completely impossible.
: Don: I am not racist. Whatever gave you that idea?
Your attitude towards particular people which you consider liers, immoralists, brain-washed and foolish, any socialist debating with you has to know that your reaction is going to the same as that of the KKK to a black civil rights activist who has turned up at one of their rallies.
: Don: I think you are projecting. I feel nothing but love for the world. You on the other hand seem to have a problem with hate.
Really? Who do I hate and give me a link because otherwise your making an ASSumption based on your lack of knowledge and prejudice.
: Don: As a point in fact, my primary concern is individual liberty. Market economics only concearns me because I am becoming aware that the free market is the only system compatable with liberty.
You've a lot to learn as long as your employed by someone your their slave, the master servant relationship is perfectly preserved under the cloak of contractual relations, you cant exercise freewill in the workplace it's not good for business.
: Don: And they were all subsurvient to the state.
No the state was their colleague in a venture for mutual benefit. They where serving no one other than theirselves, there where no heroic business men pedalling anti-state rehtoric in these regimes because they where active proponents of these regimes, they worked in to well in their interests, the interests of business.
Hey dont take my word for it, the word of a lying socialist, just ask Gee or any of the sincere libertarians, or even visit a library and get a damn history book.
: Don: No! It was to protect the workers from the uncertainty of the free market.
Dont be stupid, break free from this dogma, if it was to protect the workers why where the victims of anti-union purges? Why where every demand for a change in wages or improvements in conditions meet with executions or violence? Why where they it's greatest (Solidarity in Poland, the Civil Rights movment in Chile) opponent? It definitely wasnt to protect the workers from the government in Chile.
: Don: Talk about dogmatic!
What are you trying to suggest I'm a dogmatist, I understand the facts mate I dont dream the market is capable of things it clearly isnt or pretend it could do the job better than qualified planners in some instances.
: Don: Relax. Calm down. Listen. I never said fascism and socialism were the same. They are similar, but not the same.
They are not even similar, liberalism, especially the liberalism of Herbert Spencer, is more like facism than socialism. Take the repressive Patriotic Regime of Phinochet was it close to socialism not a bit of it!!
:They are both economic systems. Nothing less, nothing more.
Forget that they are both social and political systems where the market and materialism is subordinated to other concerns or morality codes.
:In socialism, all industry is owned by the state (or in common ownership for the imaginary case of stateless socialism).
Industry is moderated for the common and individual good with a mixture of state and nonstate ownership, a wide variety of ownership in regions refelecting the culture or choice of those regions, whether it is mutualist/market socialist, syndicalist, communists or council based, the primary aim of which is to combat want and increase the liberty of workers in the work place.
:In fascism, industry is privitly owned but state controlled. Similar (at least to a free market libertarian), but not the same.
It isnt state controlled, it was never stste controlled, never, Hitler defended the private capitalists by having the collectivists who wished to control them within his own party executed, that included some of his friends and commited ideologues from opposition so the ideal of competition represented by capitalism was very important to him.
: Don: Again, the horrors that occured were not due to the free market.
OK the horrors of Russia, China, Cuba, Cambodia where not due to socialism, how does that feel?
: Don: DOGMATIC OPIUM?
You believe in the Free market like some do a religion, you seem to be completely ignorant of externalities, public costs, market failure, under and over provison, the inablibility of the profit move to correctly organise production to everyones benefit.
The reason the market "works" is because so much force is used to make it so and propaganda used to create a one dimensional world populated by one dimensional people who cant imagine any alternative.
: Don: Yes. Socialist systems tend to result in massive bloodshed. Free market socities rarely do.
Hey Phinochets Chile was a fun place for anyone who disagreed with thier employers or the state, that was in their employers pay, their employers hired thugs. I hear all you had to do was assert liberty contrary to capitalist wishes and you could experience fun things like gang rape, soda water up your nose, electrodes to the genitals and if you where lucky even get disappeared.
Hundreds still missing, the product of a free market.
: Don: Where in the bible?
Remember the land belongs to God you are only occupying it temporarily, or something to that effect, Isiah if I'm not wrong.
:Oh, and thanks for reinforcing my dogma that socialists are bloodthirsty.
Political debate with you is impossible and believe given your dogmatic market fundamentalism that you would respond to a revolution with reactionary violence, live by the sword die by the sword.
None.
