: Doc: Not if you were the "Aryan" working class (thus, ‘national’ socialism - a socialism that exploited a race, rather than an economic group, in the name of the ‘people’)...Are you actually suggesting that the Nazi state did NOT exploit the (German) working class?
Give me an hour at the public library and I'll BURY you in citations...
: There may be problems with capitalist economies, but getting an eager workforce together is not one of them.
I know. Starvation and homelessness really bring out the best in people!
: The SR was done away with during [Lenin's] tenure...
The SR were NOT socialists, they were Cadet supporters.
: Doc: One can hardly call a Mafia protection racket ‘capitalism’...
I called it a TAX on capitalism. Without the capitalists, the Nazis would have lost their income!
: The only difference between the property-takings of the Bolsheviks and those of the Nazis...
...were the Bolsheviks took property from the RICH and gave it to the POOR---whereas the Nazis simply decreased Dept. 2 output in favor of accelerating Dept. 1 output.
(Since you've read Capital, you'll be more than familiar with those terms...)
B.S.: As Isaac Deutscher observed:
When the Nazi façade was blown away, the structure that revealed itself to the eyes of the world was the same as it has been before Hitler, with its big industrialists, its Krupps and Thyssens, its Junkers, its middle classes, its Grossbauers, its farm laborers, and its industrial workers.
BS: (For further explication on capital's profiteering role in---and support of---the Nazi state, see Franz Neumann's Behemoth, 1944/1966.)
Other points:
B.S.: In Marxist 'mythology,' the proletariat is VERY FIT.
Doc: How can this be, if capitalists only allows the proletariat enough to survive on, and work?
Dialectics, Doc.
(I'm due to get up a post on THAT subject, eh?)
Doc: Technology and mechanized production methods has made the sweatshop obsolescent...
B.S.: The sweatshop is obsolescent?
: Yes, as is obvious to anyone who lives on the East coast, where scores of empty ‘sweatshops’ dot the landscape. Such institutions have migrated to the poorer areas of the world, and will likely inevitably be replaced by more mechanized means of production in the future.
That negates my point? What are you, an isolationist? Exploitation is STILL THERE even if YOUR backyard has been tidied up.
: If misery is the only lure for those who make sneakers, dress chickens, and sew clothing, WHO keeps them at their machines? The capitalist Gestapo?
Capitalists don't need a Gestapo to bring labor crawling to them. Simply owning a monopoly on ALL means of production (and a police force to protect that!) will do the trick. Again, starvation and homelessness do capital's dirty work---inconspicuously.
... And what's up with that Faludi bit, Doc? If Al Capone said he was a capitalist and a patriot, would you believe HIM?
