Off Game answer from Pandemoniak to Bloody Baro - aka another arguing about Marx...

[Archaic]

*Yawns* So? I hit you primarily on the economics of Marx's views, which you yourself there said you supported. Did you even read Wongs essay?

If you want, I can pull up many, many rebuttals of Marx's works, and those of his successors, from PhD economists from around the world. In short, in a protracted debate on the subject, you aren't going to win. Feel free to try me though. I could use the extra research. Though you can hardly call yourself a Marxist if you don't follow his original teachings, can you?

[Pandemoniak]

Im a better politician than what you think, archaic.

[Archaic]

If he wants to *try* countering Wong's arguements, he can, but it's not like he's going to succeed. Besides Pandemoniak's likely lack of grounding in economic theory, how can you argue the truth? It'd be like saying "The sun revolves around the earth".

[Nubclear]

Originally posted by Archaic
Nah. There's nothing more to be said now.

EDIT: Well, except for Pandemoniak's concession.

But what if he counters your (or wangs/wongs arguements?) I do hope that he does...more CCCP vs. P4 stuff for the UNN!

[Archaic]

Nah. There's nothing more to be said now.

EDIT: Well, except for Pandemoniak's concession.

[DeathByTheSword]

Originally posted by Tassadar5000


I agree. However, this is most entertaining So please, continue it here: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=58960

[Nubclear]

Originally posted by DeathByTheSword
this is totally OFF_TOPIC QUIT IT WITH THIS US AGAINST THEM BULL****

I agree. However, this is most entertaining So please, continue it here: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=58960

[DeathByTheSword]

this is totally OFF_TOPIC QUIT IT WITH THIS US AGAINST THEM BULL****

[Archaic]

Pandemoniak, I hope for your sake you were in the middle of typing that while I threw the book at you. But anyway, as I said, I will now accept your concession.

[Pandemoniak]

Originally posted by The Bloody Baro
I support free medical care aid, to other poorer nations[execpt Iran, Iraq, etc.], Poor houses, soup kitchens, etc.

Why not Irak and Iran ? Doesnt they deserve to live as well as any other nation ?
And it depends of what you mean by a free medical aid. If you mean just sending bunches of medicines from time to time, then it would not solve the problem, they need to be able to produce their own health care, and that would involve capitalists lose a big part of their profits, in medical area.

Do I like what goes on in the world? No. But the best way to correct it is to have the rich HELP the poor instead of having EVERYONE be dragged down in to the poor class.

I hope you're not happy with the way the world is going on, Bloody Baro, I wont insult you by saying you are totally responsible for that. But, anyway we all share the responsability.
The thing is not dragging everyone down in to the poor class, it is just about suppressing the social classes : no poor, no rich. Everyone being a human being able to do everything he wants to try to reach happiness.

If I was very very very rich, I would give money to poor people until I was just rich.
Quoted from a Belgium Cat.

Originally posted by Voltaire
Communism, as Marx said “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, attempts to move towards equality or at least equal opportunity. I find this to be rather too idealistic, seeing as humans by nature are made unequal, therefore it is vain to treat them as if they were equal. Also the goal of equal opportunity fails due to the same reasons; there will always be those who are more skilled than others due to biological factors even if all social factors are taken out of the equation.

I agree with you on that Voltaire, humans by nature are made unequal, but they should all have the opportunity to be happy. Mark my words : the economical theory of Marx has the goal to suppress state, and in order to do that he wants to use a proletarian revolution. But he wants the suppression of state in order to stop history, and thus to stop wars, starvation, etc... and make people happy. Marx's theory is quite close to the Aristotelian eudaimonia

In capitalism on the other hand a persons worth to society is measured by their wealth, rather than their wealth being measured by their worth to society. As well as the fact that profit is put above all else, even that sacrifices in quality of a product are made for profit. The claim that people wouldn’t buy a product that isn’t of the best quality and therefore the corporations are forced to make the best quality products is flawed. So long as people are willing to buy crap, it is profitable to dispense it.

Well, the worst point in capitalism is that it is an economy based upon waste. The more people waste goods, the more they will buy. In order to make big profits, you have to extend the market (raising the number of demands) and claim it your own monopoly (lowing the number of offers). But as you can notice, war is the best thing for a capitalist economy, since you waste many things : infrastructure, weapons, food, etc... You always make more money when you do business in time of war. Capitalism started to go really bad when it started wars to make more profits.

That’s just my two-cents.

Stop talking money, for Marx's sake...

[Archaic]

© Michael Wong[list][*]"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous
proposal of the Communists." As well they should. It is a disgusting concept! Karl Marx
believed that the family structure was inherently exploitative, with capitalists treating their
wives and children as property and bequeathing their accumulated assets to their children (he saw
the concept of inheritance as a horrible evil). His solution? Children should be raised by the
state, marriage and inheritance should be eliminated, and noncommital sex should be the only form
of relationship. The man was a lunatic, and most people don't even have any idea how extreme
and unrealistic some of his views were, because they've never bothered to read his Manifesto.
[*]"Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their
proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in
seducing each other's wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and
thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to
introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free
love." Just like all of his other arguments, he starts with an incredible lie about
capitalist society and then uses it to excuse himself for the obscenities of communism.
In this case, he defends his attack on monogamous marriage by claiming that capitalists are
incapable of being monogamous anyway! Now, this may be true in Hollywood, but there are lots of
capitalists in the rest of the world who are monogamous. In any case, after selling the
fantastic lie that monogamy doesn't exist, he argues that we should forget about achieving this
supposedly impossible goal and simply embrace "free love", a euphemistic term for
unbridled hedonism and sexual promiscuity. As an aside, this idea resurfaced in the 1960's, with no
more success: it produced a generation with a soaring divorce rate and disaffected children.
[*]At this point, he finally gets down to business and lists the ten commandments of
communism:

1. "Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to
   public purposes." In other words, seizure of all real estate. No more worrying about
   saving money to buy that house ... the government will take it away!
   
2. "A heavy progressive or graduated income tax." After taking away
   your real estate, the government will take away most of your income too. Wonderful.
   
3. "Abolition of all rights of inheritance." Taking away the right to
   bequeath the fruits of your life's work to your beloved children. How charming. It's one thing to
   tax inheritance, particularly for the wealthy, but to confiscate it entirely? That's simply
   unconscionable.
   
4. "Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels." Ah,
   yes. The never-ending communist persecution of "emigrants and rebels." Although
   neo-Marxists often claim that "true" Marxism does not restrict the right to live where
   you wish, we can see here that this is simply untrue:
   
   * Marx targeted emigrants (presumably with something stronger than the general confiscation of
   land; he probably meant that they should lose everything but their underwear), because the free
   movement of people, goods and services is anathema to Marxism. This is a reminder of a serious
   problem with communism- it can only exist in isolation. A communist society will be
   "contaminated" by contact with a capitalist society, due to the capitalist habit of
   broadcasting images of its wealth and materialism. Those images act as a magnet for the "best
   and brightest," who will be rewarded like princes under capitalism but treated no better than
   the ignorant and useless under communism. However, a society will not fare well if the "cream
   of the crop" leaves. So what can they do? They can restrict access to capitalist broadcasts
   and they can criminalize emigration. And of course, this is precisely what real communist states
   have done. I think we all recall the infamous Berlin wall.
   
   * Marx wished to persecute rebels, but how does one specifically target rebels? In free
   societies, a rebel is only arrested if he commits an act which violates one of the general
   laws, such as shooting a police officer or bombing a government building. The fact that he is a
   rebel is not, in itself, considered illegal. There are no special laws designed to target
   rebels, and in fact, numerous forms of public protest, demonstration and civil disobedience are
   actually protected by law. So we return to the question of: "how do we specifically
   target rebels"? Well, one can hardly single them out by waiting for them to break a general
   law- this is what we do for all citizens. The only way to single out rebels is to target
   their political beliefs. This is exactly what real communist states have always done, and
   although neo-Marxists claim that this isn't what Marx intended, they can't explain how he planned
   to persecute "rebels" without resorting to such measures.
   
5. "Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national
   bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly." Monopoly and state control are the
   mantra of communism, but monopolies are always destructive. Without competitive forces
   to ensure quality and efficiency, monopolistic entities, whether they be corporations or government
   agencies, invariably descend into wastefulness and sloth. This is why Microsoft was brought up on
   charges by the United States Department of Justice: competition is nature's way of ensuring the
   strength of the species, and it has proven to be a good way to ensure the strength of an economy as
   well. Furthermore, competition means choice, and choice means that the buying public has
   power.
   
6. "Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of
   the state." First rule of all dictatorships: seize control of the radio stations, the
   telephone system, and the newspapers. Neo-marxists claim that Marxism does not necessarily
   lead to dictatorship, but it's hard to agree with that claim when one of Karl Marx's ten
   commandments is the state seizure of all "means of communication"! Such far-reaching
   government power over communications can be abused to muzzle miscreants or suppress public
   knowledge of state misdeeds at any time, so it effectively removes freedom of expression. Without
   freedom of expression, there can be no freedom at all. Of course, it goes without saying that the
   seizure of transport has a similar chilling effect on freedom of movement (not to mention the power
   of the masses to punish or reward competing suppliers of transportation services).
   
7. "Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state;
   the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in
   accordance with a common plan." Broadening of state industry- this is actually redundant,
   given his previous statements. If the government has already seized all real estate, it already
   controls all the factories. I'm not sure why this directive was included at all.
   
8. "Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies,
   especially for agriculture." What sounds better to you? Being paid to work, or
   being forced to work? Choosing an employer based on pay and benefits, or being forcibly
   conscripted into an "industrial army?" The phrase "obligation to work" sounds
   better than "being forced to work by threat of punishment", but without the possibility
   of positive incentive, it means the same thing. Marx would take away your freedom to choose not to
   work. Suppose you decide that you would rather move to a small cabin up north, live largely off the
   land, and do just a little bit of occasional work for spending money? In a capitalist society, you
   would be forced to adopt an austere lifestyle, but no one would stop you. But Karl Marx would
   accuse you of not pulling your weight, and you would be forced to go work the same way as
   everyone else.
   
9. "Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual
   abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the
   populace over the country." Like all advocates of social re-engineering, he thinks that it
   should be possible to "turn back the clock" on the process of industrialization. Sorry,
   but there is no practical way to decentralize heavy manufacturing operations so that they're spread
   out over the countryside like primitive feudal farming operations. This is wishful thinking at
   best, and sheer stupidity at worst.
   
10. "Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's
    factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production,
    etc." This sounds pretty good, and indeed, all civilized nations have instituted public
    schools and made child labour illegal. But if you read his full text, you will see that he is
    not merely advocating the creation of public schools. He wants children to be taken away
    from their parents and educated in state boarding schools! And he is not trying to abolish child
    labour entirely, he just wants to abolish child labour in its present form. In its
    place, he suggests that schools and industrial factories be merged into one, so that children work
    and go to school at the same time. How charming.[/list=1]

The third section of "The Communist Manifesto" is a largely forgettable collection of
historical discussions of various different socialist movements throughout history, as seen through
Marx's eyes. The fourth section is a short summation, which ends with his infamous battle cry:
"Workers of the world, unite!" That's a great slogan, but it is backed with terrible
logic. All of his arguments follow the same pattern: take an aspect of society, falsely claim that
it is hopelessly broken and cannot possibly be fixed under capitalism, and then leap headlong into
the assumption that the solution is state control.

At no time does he explain why the state is guaranteed to outperform private industry or
competitive mechanisms, nor does he explain why the state is guaranteed not to abuse the massive
powers granted to it in his "utopian" plan. He creates a false dilemma by claiming that
we must choose between a hideously distorted caricature of capitalism and his half-baked
alternative, and then he assumes that any flaw in capitalism (even imaginary ones or strengths
misrepresented as weaknesses) represents de facto support for communism (the hidden assumption is
that his half-baked alternative schemes would solve the nonexistent or exaggerated problems without
introducing enormous problems of their own).

Conclusion

Communism isn't totally insane; we all have a little bit of experience with it. After
all, a healthy family's economy is basically communist: mother and father put their earnings into a
common pool, draw from that common pool to finance purchases, and share a common standard of living
with their children. But that model, as good as it is for a family, cannot be expanded into an
entire country.

A father may work hard for the benefit of his family, but he has many motivations which don't
apply to a worker toiling for his country. The parental drive to provide for the children comes
from instincts hardwired into the human brain after millions of years of evolution. No such
evolutionary imperative drives people to toil for an abstraction such as king and country.
A father or mother receives also direct benefits from the work they do for the family. The
same is supposedly true for communism, but when the size of the "family" grows huge, the
connection between work and benefit becomes abstract. There is no immediate perceptible
change in the collective fortunes of the state when one worker slacks off, unlike the change in
a family's fortunes if Mom or Dad slacks off.

There is one thing which a communist family and a communist state do share: unfettered
power for their leaders. If Mom and Dad want to be abusive, the children have no recourse inside
the family. And if a communist government wishes to abuse its power, there are no checks and
balances to stop them. Parents are (ideally) kept from abusing their power by the rule of law, but
there are no credible police forces for the misbehaving governments of the world. If people can't
always be trusted to resist the temptations of power over their own children, how can any sane
person claim that politicians should be implicitly trusted to resist the temptations of power over
a population of total strangers?

When viewed through the eyes of history, the 20th century will be remembered mostly for its
startling rate of technological advancement, the evil of Hitler and Stalin, and the utter failure
of communism. Neo-marxists expend a tremendous amount of effort to whitewash this failure, but they
cannot deny the fact that no one has ever successfully implemented the philosophies of Karl Marx.
Every attempt to implement marxism has turned into a disastrous dictatorship, in which the
proletariat loved the communist lifestyle so much that they would risk their very lives to
escape it.

Many books have been written about why communism failed, and a discussion of that subject
is far beyond the scope of this document. I'm only attempting to highlight obvious logical and
observational errors in "The Communist Manifesto," and to show how ludicrous it is to use
this document as the blueprint for a modern society.

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Pandemoniak, I will now accept your concession.

[Archaic]

© Michael Wong
The Communist Manifesto

The first section of "The Communist Manifesto" is a long-winded and repetitive rant
about the evils of capitalism:
[list]
[*]"Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile
camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat."
This is Karl Marx's biggest mistake: his assumption that all of the societal classes in an
industrialized world will coalesce into two remaining classes: wealthy industrial property
owners and starving labourers. The critical distinction is between people who work for a
living, and people whose money works for them. This is no small distinction, and Marx's
divisive description is still echoed today by the political left wing. However, the analogy of
"hostile camps" suggests warfare, which in turn suggests that one is somehow a traitor or
a deserter if one moves from one "camp" to the other. This is simply not the case; we all
strive to become "financially independent" (read: "bourgeoisie") someday, and
many of us achieve that goal, even from the humblest beginnings. He also ignored the existence of
the middle class (which has actually grown since his era, rather than shrinking away to
nothing in his predicted polarization). Most of the middle class has both employment and
investment income, and will eventually retire to live off their money, thus making them the
true middle ground between wage earners and capitalists: at different stages of their lives, they
will be both. Since virtually the entirety of Marx's argument for communism relies upon the
assumption of two distinct, polarized, hostile classes, the existence of a viable middle ground
literally cuts his knees out from under him.
[*]"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored
and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the
poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers." This is really just a repetition
of his earlier attempt to pretend that society is polarized into those who work and those who live
off their money. Now, I don't mean to suggest that our society, either in its current state or in
Karl Marx's time, is ideal. However, his artificial polarization was an inaccurate description of
events in the 19th century, and his writings proved an inaccurate prediction of events in the 20th
century. Events have shown that a free-market system does offer great opportunity for those
with ambition and intelligence, contrary to what Karl Marx predicted. Professionals with valuable
skills do work for their wages, but it's not a prison; they also invest in things like
houses and retirement funds, and most of them will eventually retire on those investments.
Moreover, those who would defend him by saying that he couldn't have known about future events
would be well advised to consider the fact that all of these objections were also raised in his
era. Clearly, his detractors knew something that he didn't.
[*]"Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange
and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange,
is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he
has called up by his spells." Here he tries to portray one of the strengths of the
free market as a weakness, by complaining that someone should be in "control". But
why does someone have to be in "control" of the economy? "Laissez-faire"
capitalism is based on the fact that free markets control themselves. The laws of supply and
demand and the free-market forces of competition control the economy, without any government
bureacracy holding the reins. The strong survive, the weak perish, and the group as a whole becomes
stronger (it is an historical irony that Darwin and Marx published within a dozen years of each
other, since Darwinian evolution is analogous to the free-market system which eventually triumphed
over Marxism). The only role for the government of a true free-market economy is to ensure free
competition rather than monopoly (which destroys choice), and to provide security and
infrastructure for its citizens. The vast disparity in living conditions between communist states
and free-market states is proof that the lack of a central controlling authority is not the
glaring weakness that he claimed it to be.
[*]"It is enough to mention the commercial crises [recessions] that, by their
periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more
threateningly." Yet again, he describes one of the strengths of a free market as a
weakness. How can periodic recessions be a strength, you ask? That's simple: like any
self-regulating system, a free market economy corrects itself whenever it gets "out of
whack". Sometimes, this correction comes in the form of a recession, and sometimes, it comes
in the form of a boom. Either way, it's evidence of the free market's self-regulating mechanism in
action. Millions of people subtly and collectively influence the cyclical direction of countless
separate industries through their spending and investing choices (every dollar counts as a
"vote" of sorts, making the free market more democratic than the government in many
ways). Did you ever wonder why central banks often raise interest rates in order to slow down an
"overheated" economy? It's because they understand that know that an excessive upswing
must be followed by a correspondingly violent downswing, so they try to encourage the masses to
invest more and spend less. At all times, it is the masses who are truly in control of the
economy, while the government merely tries to nudge them in the right direction. Compare this to
the communist system, where the government takes control of the economy away from the
masses. It is ironic that an economic system which purports to fight for the masses will actually
take away most of their power.
[*][Explaining recessions] "Because there is too much civilization, too much
means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce." This is the third time
he describes a strength of capitalism as a weakness. Chronic over-production is not a bad
thing! It's actually a good thing, for two reasons:

1. Availability of necessities. When the supply of a product is controlled so that it
   matches demand, there is always the risk that the government bureaucrats who are doing this
   "matching" will make a mistake, resulting in a supply shortfall (remember the Soviet
   bread lines?). However, when there's an over-abundance of product, this cannot happen. Consider the
   example of the fresh produce section at your local supermarket. They throw out a lot of
   food, because they chronically stock more than they can sell. Is this bad? Of course not; it
   ensures that nobody with a job (or even a welfare cheque) will starve, and it also lets us
   carefully pick only the most ripe and appetizing food.[/li]
2. Freedom of consumer choice. When there are too many products out there, all vying
   for your money, you have the luxury of choosing which one you want. But Karl Marx's communist
   government would take away your ability to choose what you need and which supplier you'll use. The
   freedom to choose is not a triviality; it is power. Why does the government care what
   voters think, even if only during election years? Because our votes give us the power to choose
   the other party. Why do companies care what customers think? Because our dollars give us the
   power to choose a competitor. In a free market, the masses have the power to not only punish
   a company for wrongdoing, but to totally destroy it, driving into bankruptcy and erasing it
   from the face of the planet.[/list=1]
   
3. "Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the
   work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the
   workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous,
   and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him." This is an example of Karl
   Marx's absolutely incredible arrogance. How can an ivory tower intellectual who never worked
   in a factory presume to know what it's like? Unlike Marx (or his fans, most of whom have never set
   foot inside a factory), I actually have worked in a highly automated factory, and I
   have worked as a skilled professional, co-operating with others to design and build
   products. I mention this because it means that I can speak from personal experience to refute his
   claims: when I see one of those products rolling down the street as part of a finished automobile,
   or sitting on a store shelf somewhere, I do feel a sense of pride in workmanship. Karl Marx
   was wrong; you can take pride in something that you made with the aid of technology or
   through co-operative work. And if you doubt that, go down to Bowling Green (Kentucky, USA), accost
   a worker at the Corvette plant, and tell him that you think the Vette is built like ****. You just
   might get an earful (or a sound beating).

The second section of "The Communist Manifesto" is a long-winded and repetitive
advertisement for communism, in which every argument takes the form of a hideously distorted
strawman caricature of capitalism, followed by his model of communism and the accompanying implicit
message of: "there- isn't that better?".

• He describes communists by saying that "they have no interests separate and
  apart from those of the proletariat as a whole." In other words, they're selfless and they
  have no ambitions for power whatsoever. And if you believe that, I have some swamp land in Florida
  to sell you. The reality of communism is that every communist revolution in history has been
  precipitated by a small group of people who gave themselves enormous power while trampling upon the
  rights and freedoms of the people. Neo-marxists defend this ugly history by saying that a
  "true" communist would not commit the sins of Leninism, Maoism, Stalinism, etc., but they
  fail to realize that communism seeks to take power from the masses by its very nature, by
  replacing free markets (which are controlled by the masses) and competing corporations (which the
  masses can punish, reward, or even destroy) with government monopolies, which the public has no
  power to directly control (to say nothing of punishing or destroying them if they are displeased
  with their performance).
  
• "The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other
  proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois
  supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat." Ludicrous fantasy. An entire
  social class cannot seize power. Instead, it can only appoint representatives to take
  that power. No matter what flowery language Karl Marx chooses to use, the simple reality is that
  government power will always be in the hands of the few, regardless of whether that
  government is communist or capitalist. The only question is how much power we want that government
  to have, and Marx made the mistake of assuming that the more power the government had, the more
  power the masses would have. This is a very serious "have your cake and eat it too"
  fallacy; you cannot simultaneously give more power to the masses and to the government! Marx
  felt that free markets are undemocratic and unfair, but in reality, free markets are actually
  more democratic than governments, communist or otherwise. They actually respond to
  the whims of the masses, while governments only make promises. Look at Wal-Mart; its profits
  dwarf that of every rich person's boutique and specialty store in America. Now look at your
  federal capital: is there any venue there where your average Wal-Mart customer would be taken
  seriously?
  
• "In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single
  sentence: Abolition of private property." This is actually untrue. The core of his theory
  is summed up in his idea that society is polarized into subsistence wage earners and people who
  live off their money. This is his suggestion for a solution to that oversimplification, and
  it's a solution which is never really justified. If we translate this from the language of Marxism
  into the language of the free market, he is saying that he wants to abolish your freedom to decide
  whether to use your wages to buy something, or to invest. You will be forced to spend every
  penny of every paycheque to buy state-supplied goods and services (at prices and in quantities
  fixed by the state so that there's none left over). If you attempted to put your money in the bank
  and get interest on it, you would be a lawbreaker.
  
• "The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of
  the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a
  laborer." In an industrialized world, no one will be paid more than the bare minimum
  required to keep us alive? In the real industrialized world (as opposed to his sterile
  imaginary world), if you have a skill which is in demand, then you can command a higher salary for
  your services. Conversely, if you have a skill which is ridiculously commonplace (eg. if your
  resume lists "literate in the English language" as your only job skill), then you will
  get paid a pathetic wage. I can't believe people still think of Karl Marx as some sort of genius
  when he obviously didn't even understand the principles of supply and demand.
  
• "It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work
  will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought
  long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those who acquire anything, do not
  work." Naturally, he tries to deal with one of the most popular criticisms of communism.
  He argues that the idea of "incentive to work" is flawed because rich people have no
  financial incentive to work, so their society should have self-destructed through "sheer
  idleness". However, he ignores the fact that many rich people are in fact idle (a fact
  which he himself complains about, yet he ignores it here), thus showing that a lack of
  incentive will keep people from working. Those who do work do so either to make sure
  they stay rich, or because they have replaced the motivation of money with the motivation of
  power. Either way, people only work because they have a personal incentive to do so, and no
  one has ever produced a compelling argument that this isn't the case.

[Archaic]

Alright Pandemoniak, and every other Socialist here, I'm going to call your bluff. You want to support Marx's theories, fine. Now justify them. First, I'd like to see if you even know your economic theory....no, actually, screw it, I'm just going to throw the book at you.

The following essay is copyrighted by Michael Wong. It may be referenced from his website ( http://www.stardestroyer.net ) via the following direct link. http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Marxism.html
Please note that I have not asked his permission for using this, however I hope he'd not object to it. All text has been copied exaxtly as he wrote it, with a few modifications to the coding so it appears here without HTML.

(N.B. I've had to split this into 3 posts due to the length. Apologies for any formatting problems, but converting HTML to UBB code is hard work. If you want a better version, go read his site. Great read, and not just this essay on Marxism. I'll probably end up throwing his religion stuff at Crisler later, so watch out.)

© Michael Wong

Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto"

Written: 2000.03.04
Last revised: 2001.05.17

Background

When it comes to belief systems, there are many ideas which, if challenged, tend to provoke
violent defensive reactions on the part of their believers. Star Trek fans, a disproportionate
number of whom are pseudoscience afictionados, tend to become irritable when reminded of the vast
gulf between Trek pseudoscience and real science. Creationists tend to become emotional and
defensive when reminded that their precious ideas may make for good religious dogma, but they bear
no resemblance whatsoever to science. And in spite of the utter failure of communism in the
twentieth century, its defenders attack any criticism as "capitalist dogma".

Karl Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto in the middle of the 19th century, which was a heady
time in human history. The Industrial Revolution was radically and rapidly changing society. New
technologies were coming out all the time, and many spoke of huge, sweeping changes to come. The
idea of "social engineering" became popular; people believed that, armed with advancing
technology and an enlightened world view, they would be able to tear down the rotten and
dysfunctional society that thousands of years of human civilization had slowly constructed, and
replace it with a new, improved version.

The problem with Marx's grandiose vision of social engineering is that it assumes humans will
play by rules which are against their nature, and that a large industrialized economy is simple
enough to be centrally managed. Any engineer knows that when faced with an enormously complex piece
of machinery, it is much easier to tweak it than it is to replace it. Complex systems such as
societies and economies tend to obey the laws of chaos theory; the short and long-term effects of
changes are unpredictable by even the most brilliant economists and sociologists, so any attempts
at "social engineering" should be performed very carefully, and very slowly. It is
a laudable goal to improve society, but it should be done through gradual change, not
"revolution".

The funny thing is that communism does follow a twisted sort of logic. If you accept its
underlying premises, some of its conclusions actually do make sense. However, you
can't accept its underlying premises. Humans won't work as hard without self-interest to
motivate them, as anyone familiar with the behaviour of our evolutionary ancestors will quickly
realize. The collective self-interest of a nation of millions is much too remote and abstract to
have the emotional immediacy necessary to strongly motivate most individuals. An economy of
millions or hundreds of millions of people is not simple enough to predict and control from
a central bureaucracy. People won't give up the traditional family structure, which has
existed (either as monogamy or polygamy) in one form or another since the dawn of recorded history.
And absolute power does corrupt absolutely, even in the hands of the benevolent Communist
Party.

[lucky22]

Voltaire wrote:
> A meritocratic system IMO is the most logical way to >proceed; a system where advancement is based on >personal achievement and ability, as well as >contribution to society; thus the greater your >contribution to society the better your living >standards. This does create inequality based on the >lines of ability. Nevertheless to even the playing field >all socio-economic inequalities should be eliminated >and equal opportunity should be provided for to the >best of a society’s ability.

I'm glad you believe in public education, voltaire, but your classical liberalism blinds you to what "merit" is. The man who created Ronald McDonald fulfills your definition as completely (or rather more so) as a skilled professor of mathematics- considering your criteria under a capitalist paradigm. M@ni@c's blind faith in a technology enslaved to selling itself more shiny baubles and your own faith in in the proud, strong and self-sufficient individual both rule out any pro-active power by humanity over the big picture. You guys may even be right, but geez-- if we're all pigs in a pen, why valorize and even worship the butcher's knife??

[FlameFlash]

Except for the fact that Pandemoniak has been attacked IC about his communist views I'd agree with you Darkness.

Pandemoniak, IRL I'd certainly have to agree with you... unfortunatly the ideal of both capitalism and communalism can never be reached.

If you recall, Adam Smith never envisioned Bill Gates when he explained capitalism, but rather more something if all the different UNIX distributions were in competition with each other (to put it into the computer world terms.) So capitalism isn't in its original, pure form either.