Carn,
I said "Communism always leads to starvation", i didn't say "Only communism leads to starvation".
With communism you will have more starved people than without.
there has been starvation or famine pretty much everywhere. And again I am not disagreeing that so called communist governments caused Starvation. In the case of the USSR in the 1930s, for example, this was very intentional. Stalin was using hunger as a weapon against opposition in the Ukraine. My point is that there are a lot of factors that lead to starvation or mass hunger. If a poor, famine prone country becomes socialist and then has another famine after it has become socialist, it may be that the famine was caused by other factors. And most countries that had socialist revolutions (including Russa) were dirt poor famine prone countries. If a previously wealthy country that had a highly developed agriculture goes through a famine than explanations that draw upon the type of government would make more sense than countries in which famines were common.
One could equally argue that given that there was no major famine in the USSR after 1947 that communism broke the cycle of famine and starvation in the USSR. And there has been no major famine in China since 1961 so one could similarly make the same argument about China. I wouldn't make that argument, by the way.
But the point is that in comparing countries, we have to pay attention to particular historical details (like when the famine happened, were there external causes like war or an environmental catastrophe, were famines common, what is the income distribution of a country, what is its relation to the world market, etc) and not just what it calls itself or what ideology inspires its form of organization.
British imperialism (when Britain was already capitalist) led to enormous famines both in Ireland (considered the worst one relative to population) and in India. These had nothing to do with food production or socialized ownership but with the fact that the British were importing their food production because they could, through the free market, pay a higher price. There is more to it of course in relation to the particular imperial policies of teh British, and their racism towards Irish and Indian people.
And given that we live in a capitalist free market world economy, and there are millions of people who die every year from malnourishment or who who live without sufficient food, than it seems equally plausible that capitalism also causes (and certainly does not prevent) famines in the world as well.
And my reference to the article on Ethiopia was simply to cite the point I made that one of the causes of the famine is the form of Ethiopia's participation in the world market where it sells agricultural produce (cash crops) at the expense of domestic food production. I could have equally cited wiki or some leftist academic (whose work is generally not online), but I wanted an accessible source that would be considered more legit given that it is not a common mainstream claim. In any case, even if we took Ethiopia to be socialist in the 1980s, there were famines in Ethiopia both before the military coup that ushered in so called 'marxist-leninist' generals, and there have been famines after they were replaced by a pro American government.
It is true that the land is owned by the government in Ethiopia and redistributed to the peasants every few years. While this is undoubtedly a bad strategy the aim is to avoid a situation in which peasants are made landless and forced to immigrate to cities with high unemployment. Peasants without land are not going to have more access to food then peasants with land.
And these 1.3% include the people who are too stupid to use there money for food instead of drugs or tabacco. So less than 1.3% of population suffers from serious undernutrition due to lack of money.
And nobody starved to death.
Could be better, but implying this is comparable to the 30s in the Soviet Union, where there might have been up to 5 Million dead, about 3% of the population is just stupid.
I did not make that comparison. My point is that even in the wealthiest country in the world, a large part of the population are food insecure. Because I live next to the US, I have had an opportunity to visit it periodically. This is entirely anecdotal but what strikes me about the US is how a country can both simultaneously be so obviously rich and so incredibly poor. Some of poverty that I saw in Washington DC compared to that which I have seen in Kenya or Pakistan (two countries that are often identified as poor third world countries.) And this was side by side with some of the most beautiful ostentatious buildings in the world.
And to explain that 1.3% are seriously malnourished in the US because they are stupid would be all the better for evidence. And in any case, 'stupid' people deserve to be well fed just as much as 'smart' people do.
So we can agree, that communism is about the end of free market through the abolishment of the right to properity as it is written in the UN declaration of human rights?
Not exactly. Perhaps this is a semantic distinction, but the right to property is enshrined in the declaration of rights, not the right to private property. I think we need to distinguish between different kinds of property. The term private property sometimes gets conflated to mean personal property :as in ones clothing, furniture, house, car, yard, tv etc...) Marxists do not generally want to socialize this. What they want to socialize is the property that is used produce the conditions of our collective existence, what is called capital (agricultural land, resources, factories, transportation facilities, hospitals, warehouses etc...). The idea is that rather than using these things for profit (making them private property) they should be controlled by the people that work at and rely on them to live. The history of private property from the Marxist view, is the expropriation of what was owned by working people and peasants by the ruling classes (using the state) through the processes of enclosures domestically and colonialism abroad. The right to private property held by the rich is historically based on the taking away of common property from vast majority of the population. If you read the last chapters of Capital, Marx provides an account of this process in England, and it has been repeatedly confirmed by other historians (Eg. Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsawm to name a couple)
The kind of property that marxists might talk about (if they even would use the language of property) would be personal property and collective or social property (which is the means by which we reproduce our lives, and should therefore belong to everyone). Not state property and not private property.
Didn't Marx or other communists/socialists ever notice, that poor people can get rich and rich people poor?
So people can get rich and own properity themselves, what is the problem?
Of course they noticed this. The fact that the odd poor person becomes rich and the odd rich person became poor doesn't change the fact that capitalist society is class divided into the poor and the rich (and that most people who are rich remain rich and most people who are poor remain poor) What struck Marx and other socialists, was the inequality between the rich and the poor as well as the brutal working conditions facing most working people in the 19th century: 60 hour + work weeks in horrible conditions without job security or any kind of health and safety, often making pitiful wages, not to mention child labour.
This was in spite of the claims that the capitalist form that society took in the UK in the 19th century was claimed to be emancipating. Marx and other socialists thought that real emancipation had to be more than an abstract right of workers to quit their job and find another, but actual control over their workplaces and their conditions of work. The fact that these conditions of work have changed for the better for many of us has to do with the creation of unions, and other social movements, as well as socialist or social democratic political parties who fought for improvements.
You have any link for the claim, that unions fought for the right to vote?
If you read histories of the labour movement or the development of democracy in Western states (as well as many non Western states) you will find that the labour movement and socialists were very active in struggles for freedom of the press, for universal suffrage and other democratic rights... It makes sense though that the people who were denied these rights would be the ones actively fighting for them. If you want sources, I would suggest picking up a book on labour history, or even a more general history of a particular country. I suppose Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" would be one good example for the US. I would imagine however, that any account of the civil rights movement there in the 50s and 60s (or before) would note that many labour unions took an active role (although some were also pretty racist). In Canada you could pick up Craig Heron's "A short history of the working class" or Bryan D Palmer's "Working Class Experience". EP Thompson has an account of the early period of democratic struggles in the "Making of the English Working class" for the UK.
Other more recent examples would be COSATU, the national union in South Africa which was allied with the ANC and the South African Communist Party against apartheid. The only thing I have read on that is Martin J Murray (South Africa: Time of Agony, Time of Destiny) I'm sure there are plenty of sources also on Solidarity in Poland, or on the role of labour in resisting the Chinese state during the Tiannamen Square massacre (and after).
I don't mean to bombard you with references, but it is hard to find good concise and general histories online. Nonetheless google labour, movement, suffrage and you will find some indications that labour played a significant role. Actually, one article I did find on line which provides a bit more of an overview is Steve Cushion "Mass democracy and rise of the Labour Movement" at
HTML:
http://languages.londonmet.ac.uk/med/med/mass_dem.htm
,
but I think you would be better off reading specific labour or general political histories of particular countries.
My point is not to idealize unions or to claim that they are unproblematic. But they were organized by working people to improve their conditions of life and to win them rights within capitalist society. And one of the central struggles of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe and North America was for universal suffrage and other democratic rights.
Sorry, but if that is capitalism, we have since at least 8000 years capitalism and capitalism is identical with specilization, because as soon as someone is not producing everything for himself, he needs to sell his own labour or products of it on the market to survive.
I don't agree that capitalism, private property or capitalist markets have been around for 8000 years. In fact I think the nature of property rights, and markets have changed enormously over this time. This is a claim that I would like to see some evidence and citation for. The way I understand it, the historical debate around the origins of capitalism either locate it in the 14th to 15th century with the expansion of trade and the origins of colonialism by European powers and / or with the dispossession of the peasantry and the development of profit oriented agriculture in Britain. In both cases, the theory goes, the profits produced enabled industrialization and the dislocations produced created an industrial working class.
My point before was that the existence of trade (and hence a market) or even private property are not enough to have capitalism. People have traded throughout history, but it does not mean that their societies or the reasons that they traded had anything in common with today's capitalist societies or the reasons that people trade today. Until the last couple of hundred years, most people in Europe were peasants who could reproduce their existence (ie continue to live as they were comfortable with) without relying substantially on trading what they produced. They produced for themselves, their families and their communities. Much of the land was held in common and people's claim to the land was generally based on the fact that they worked the land, not that they owned it. If they traded at all it was out of convenience or to purchase luxury items. If the market price for wheat collapsed they were hardly effected since they produced enough wheat and other foodstuffs to live. I don't want to idealize this lifestyle as they were generally exploited and oppressed, but they were exploited and oppressed politically through the power that feudal lords held over them.
In Western Europe and North America, by the late 19th century, most of the population are either farmers who are compelled to sell their produce to the market for cash so that they can buy from the market the conditions of life or they are workers who sell their labour for a wage which they use to purchase the conditions of life, such as it was for them. For trade to become capitalist, people must be compelled to sell to the market in order to reproduce their existence. My parents, who are farmers, produce thousands of times more food than that which was produced a couple of hundred years ago in England or Europe by an individual peasant. However, whereas that peasant would survive the collapse in the price for wheat because they did not primarily produce to sell to the market, my parents would be devastated by a collapse in the price of wheat today as they would not be able to afford to buy food. If you want to read the literature on the origins of capitalism, Ellen Wood (the book "Agrarian origins of capitalism")provide the accounts that I am most familiar with.
And why is my survival at stake?
I do not know which country you live in, but in most western capitalistic countries i know, people do not starve because of unemployment.
You are right that people who are unemployed don't for the most starve. I'm sorry if I gave that impression. But the reason they don't is because labour and other social movements have won a modicum of a social protections such as unemployment insurance, and welfare that protect them when they are unemployed. People can also rely on family support, churches, communities etc... in times of need.
Nonetheless, the reason that people sell their labour to business in our society is largely because they are compelled to. We don't produce the goods we need to live, we purchase them and we can't do that, unless we have money. We don't have money unless we can sell something, usually our labour. This might seem fair, if we were all entering the labour market as equal individuals who could negotiate our conditions of work. But some of us enter the labour market to buy our labour with a lot more power than many of us selling it. Consequently, when we sell our labour, we often don't get a lot of control over the kind of work we do, how we do it, how many hours we do it for, and how much money we make, whether we have job security. And while some people become rich, a lot more people get stuck doing horsehockey work for low pay. Again, under feudalism, wealth was distributed unequally through direct political means. Under capitalism, unequal distribution is masked by the pretense that we are equals exchanging in the market when in fact some of us are Bill Gates and some of us are like us.
Rather than a goal of our work being interesting, and exciting, most of us hope for work that simply pays us enough so that we can enjoy our time away from work. This is what socialism is supposed to emancipate us from.
Do you realy think there is some secret cicle keeping track of unemployment rates and acting if unemployment gets too low?
I don't think there is an organized conspiracy if that is what you mean. There is, however, within, neoclassical economics, the idea of a natural unemployment rate usually between 6 and 8% (at least in Canada). There are obvious reasons for this. Bringing it back to the topic of inflation, very low unemployment can spur inflation as the more workers earning a wage, the more demand there is for consumer goods. Higher demand for consumer goods pushes up the price of commodities relative to money. It also increases worker's bargaining power vis-a-vis employers since it in periods of very low unemployment, it may be difficult to replace workers demanding higher wages, or better working conditions. Very high unemployment is not generally desirable either as it reduces demand for goods produced and can increase social unrest and social spending (both things that can cut into profits). Governments do generally take this seriously as they use immigration policy and education policy as a way to maintain unemployment rates at a sufficient level.
You claim that atrocities are not an inseparable part of capitalism but are an inseparable part of the creation of communism. Again, I don't agree. I actually don't think you know your history.
So called democratic revolutions were generally very bloody. The US fought a revolution to gain independence, a civil war to formally end slavery, and still many people were denied real democracy and civil rights and ahve had to fight for it since in the US. Britain had a bloody civil war in the 16th century to assert the control of parliament over the monarchy. France had a revolution in which a lot of people were guillotined.
The history of capitalism because of the enclosures and colonialism is even worse. In Canada and the US we massacred, among others, the First Nations people to take their land and resources. Just to give one other example from Canada, the national railroad in Canada (which made cross - national trade possible and kickstarted industrialization) was greased with the blood of thousands of Chinese workers, and the survivors were all too often deported after the railroad was complete. And there are many similar examples in the US and Europe.Many of the interests of early capitalists from Europe were bound up with colonialism (and much of the wealth that could be reinvested as capital in Europe was stolen from the colonies). Again, as I went through in my last email, colonialism was incredibly bloody with death tolls that sometimes compare to that of the holocaust .
And in the service of capitalists, the state brutally brought about the enclosures, dispossessing peasants from their land, forcing them to seek work as industrial labourers. The state also crushed democratic, and working class movements.
To quote Marx, "capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt."
Finally, it is not the case that free market policies invariably leads to economic development and general improvements to people's well being and statist development invariably doesn't. There are many example of very open economies that have low growth rates or where high growth rates have coincided with worsening standards of living for many people. At different times, so called socialist countries had very high growth rates. Both the USSR and China grew incredibly fast at different moments in their history. In many examples of 'successful' capitalist development such as Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan, Japan, much of the economy was state run.
In any case, economies that are state run might call themselves socialist, but are not what was envisioned by socialism or by Marx. Perhaps the SOviet style of socialism iis the only alternative to capitalism (in which case an argument in defense of capitalism would be more persausive) but I still like to hope that there are better forms of socialism that don't lead to Soviet totalitarianism. And I like that Civilization 4 makes that possible in the game.
Again, sorry for the long winded reply. Since we are probably annoying or boring others on this list I will give you the last word and try not to respond again. I'm a political studies major so I tend to be too argumentative.
![[NWO]_Valis](https://civfanatics-data.community.forum/avatars/m/110/110973.jpg?1475248361){kind=avatar}
