For Frell's Sake

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

For all their imperfections, fanatics willing to murder people who get in the way of a Utopian prophecy aren't inevitable features of liberal democracy or capitalism.

No, just mass starvation and artificial drought.

[Wild_Kraken]

Democratic socialism =/= communism. Attlee was a bonafide cold warrior, he was involved in the Malayan emergency and the Korean war, and encouraged the U.S. to take a firmer stand against communism.
And last I checked the Soviet Union didn't stop being a totalitarian mess after Khrushchev denounced Stalin.

Technically "communism" refers to the post-socialist form of society. What the so-called "communist" countries were practicing was a kind of socialism. It's the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics after all. Socialism us a multifaceted ideology that can be expressed as watered down, ineffectual reformists or authoritarianism or anarchism or many, many other ways.

Firstly, FDR was a new liberal not a socialist. Secondly the capitalist push back isn't supposed to happen according the Marxist view of history. There's supposed to be an inevitable and permanent worker's revolution which should lead to the establishment of a socialist state which should wither away into full communism. No backsies. "Communism in 20 years" Khrushchev says "history is on our side, we will bury you". Didn't happen. The Bolshevik overthrow of the provisional government wasn't supposed to happen. Prague and Hungry shouldn't have happened. 89-91 shouldn't have happened.

Firstly, I never said FDR was a socialist, just that he tried to reform a capitalist system.

Secondly, the Marxist view of history requires certain material conditions be met for progress. This is basic stuff, explained within the first few pages of The Communist Manifesto. The Bolsheviks realized pretty early on that their's wasn't the inevitable and permanent revolution. One major reason is that the revolution was predicted to be in the most industrialized nation, which was not Russia. So Khrushchev said communism in 20 years. He was wrong. So what? There's nothing in communist theory that says communists will be right about everything.

Meanwhile, in the present day, we have a capitalism that is continuing its ever present lust of profits at the expense of the environment, what little reforms people have won are constantly under attack with people being forced to accept more and more privatization and austerity. Capitalism can't go on forever, eventually it will run out of people and ways to exploit them and resources to extract. When that happens, there's either going to be a transition to socialism, or it will be the end of the Earth.

And speaking of the end of the Earth, can we talk about how climate change is basically the fault of capitalism? Private firms like ExxonMobile knew the science of climate change 40 years ago, and did nothing but spend millions of dollars to spread misinformation about it. Oh! And the Tobacco industry. Let's talk about that.

[Antiboyscout]

people being forced to accept more and more privatization and austerity.

you think capitalism is responsible for austerity? Please, this happens when a country reaches late stage Socialism. Now you know what happens when a government runs out of other peoples money.

[TGLS]

Meanwhile, in the present day, we have a capitalism that is continuing its ever present lust of profits at the expense of the environment,

Like communism is all that better
http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/13/if- ... vironment/
https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=w ... IX6G6FM9XQ

[Arkle]

Oh! And the Tobacco industry. Let's talk about that.

Yeah, how sad is it that the friggin' Nazis, the most evil people who ever lived, figured out that smoking was bad for you before we did? (Source: http://www.cracked.com/article_18378_6- ... pires.html)

Sidenote: Did you know that comedy legend Stan Freberg broke new ground when he refused to accept ads for tobacco companies on his radio show? In the 1950s? Ahead of the curve on that one. Just another reason to appreciate that man. Let's face it, without Stan, we'd probably have no Weird Al.

[Wild_Kraken]

people being forced to accept more and more privatization and austerity.

you think capitalism is responsible for austerity? Please, this happens when a country reaches late stage Socialism. Now you know what happens when a government runs out of other peoples money.

"Late stage socialism"? Tell me, how exactly does a country achieve late stage socialism without first achieving the most basic feature of socialism? No country that has/is currently undergoing austerity such as Great Britain, is anywhere near socialist. The defining feature of socialism is the public ownership of the means of production. While having a national health service and other social safety nets are great, and to some extent you could maybe classify them as socialist programs, they are not its defining feature. Great Britain, the EU, America, et al. are by no stretch of the imagination socialist.

Also, "late stage socialism"? You mean the withering away of the state into a communist society? Wow, who knew we were so close Not every political term has an equal but opposite equivalent. Just because there's an Alt-Right doesn't mean there's an Alt-Left, and just because we live in late stage capitalism doesn't mean we also somehow live in late stage socialism.

Like communism is all that better

Communist countries weren't the cause of the BP oil spill, or the Bhopal disaster, or, to a large extent, climate change. The difference being that while the scary communist nations are for the most part gone and so can no longer destroy the environment. The capitalist nations keep on keeping on.

Yeah, how sad is it that the friggin' Nazis, the most evil people who ever lived, figured out that smoking was bad for you before we did? (Source: http://www.cracked.com/article_18378_6- ... pires.html)

That's capitalism for you. The people who work in the tobacco/oil/arms industries aren't bad people, per se, or at least they aren't fundamentally different from anyone else. But when you take good, normal people, and steep them in the capitalist logic of profits and competition, suddenly it becomes logical and acceptable to hide the fact that you've known since the 40s that your product causes cancer.

[Antiboyscout]

Great Britain, the EU, America, et al. are by no stretch of the imagination socialist.

But when you take good, normal people, and steep them in the capitalist logic of profits and competition, suddenly it becomes logical and acceptable to hide the fact that you've known since the 40s that your product causes cancer.

1st
How much taxation and regulation do you have to put on a business before you de facto control it? When a gov can determine Who, how, where, when, and how much a business can do business, how can you say they don't control the means of production.

2nd
So you're saying, competition is not natural behavior, at least for humans. You know, I never thought I would see a real live Lysenkovist. You want to pretend that communism is just an economic system and yet here you are competition is an invention of capitalism and some sort of moral evil.

[Admiral X]

To get the number of deaths that high you absolutely have to include the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward was an agricultural/industrial policy that was developed by Mao and really had no precedence in communist theory. There's nothing in the Communist Manifesto that says to kill all sparrows, nothing in Das Kapital about setting up backyard furnaces to make pig iron. It also wasn't malicious. Mao didn't intend to cause a famine, so it wasn't purposefully starving people. The famine was a failure of the state to provide food for all its citizens.

Since you are, unknowingly or not, attributing the deaths of the Great Leap Forward to communism, it is entirely fair and accurate to attribute similar instances of capitalist states not providing food for all their citizens. Not including things like purges and intentional killings by capitalist dictators and the lack of access to water and vaccines, the deaths by starvation alone under capitalism surpasses 100 million every 14 years.

You seem to be missing the point, which is that communists have killed far more people than the Nazis ever did. Both are totalitarian collectivist systems which are oppressive to whatever people they rule over, but while basically everyone but Nazis have no trouble condemning Nazism in particular or fascism in general, there's a disturbingly large number of people making excuses for communism in their attempt to essentially act as cheerleaders for it.

[Antiboyscout]

To get the number of deaths that high you absolutely have to include the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward was an agricultural/industrial policy that was developed by Mao and really had no precedence in communist theory.

Hold on there comrade. Mao developed his agricultural reforms based on Lycencoism and that is definitely based on communist dogma.

[Wild_Kraken]

1st
How much taxation and regulation do you have to put on a business before you de facto control it? When a gov can determine Who, how, where, when, and how much a business can do business, how can you say they don't control the means of production.

Are the people who work for the business making all the decisions on how to run the business democratically? Is the surplus value the workers created being redistributed to them or is it being redistributed to the owner(s)/shareholders? The government imposing regulations under capitalism is worlds away from public control of the means of production. Being forced to provide a modicum of safety equipment, or not being able to use dangerous materials in consumer products, or not being able to fire people based on certain criteria has nothing to do with socialism when businesses are still ones of top-down authoritarian control that exploits their workers.

2nd
So you're saying, competition is not natural behavior, at least for humans. You know, I never thought I would see a real live Lysenkovist. You want to pretend that communism is just an economic system and yet here you are competition is an invention of capitalism and some sort of moral evil.

What you're engaging in is a form of the appeal to nature. We can look to nature and find myriad behaviors that we in human society would not tolerate. Murder, for one. Should we allow murder because it is natural behavior? What about rape? Or cannibalism? As human beings with sentience and an innate moral sense, we are more than capable of turning away from natural behaviors that we find to be morally repugnant. Capitalist competition has proven itself time and time again to lead to unacceptably immoral outcomes. We are not obligated to forever engage in it simply because it's "natural behavior".

That all having been said capitalist competition developed along with capitalism. It is a specific form of competition that came from specific historical and material conditions. How exactly can it be natural behavior when for the vast majority of human existence capitalism did not exist and so neither did capitalist competition?

You seem to be missing the point, which is that communists have killed far more people than the Nazis ever did. Both are totalitarian collectivist systems which are oppressive to whatever people they rule over, but while basically everyone but Nazis have no trouble condemning Nazism in particular or fascism in general, there's a disturbingly large number of people making excuses for communism in their attempt to essentially act as cheerleaders for it.

The difference is that Nazism can never be anything but racist. Its racism is the defining feature that (theoretically at least) differentiates it from fascism under Franco or Mussolini. Even some form of non-authoritarian Nazism would still be racist, would still engage in ethnic cleansing. It is baked into the ideology at its core.

When again, as I've said before, there is nothing in the core of communism, of Marxism, or socialism, that requires the cultural revolution, or the murder of the kulaks, or the great leap forward. At the core of communism is a world without exploitation, without sexism, without racism. That is fundamentally a better world than what we have now. That is why it has so many "cheerleaders" as you call them. People get that the world we live in now sucks, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and that it is unsustainable. Aside from tankies, no one is a cheerleader for Stalin or Mao. People are cheerleaders for a better world.