Communist Education?

[joncha]

Originally posted by Ned


So what if Marx predicted the next Ice Age. Marx was not God.

A lot of what Marx had to say about capitalism has got to be put to a lie by the reality of the USA. Production is high. Things are cheap. Everyone is taken care of, including old people. We are trending, rapidly trending, towards that utopia Marx envisioned.

Given their prosperity in today's America, why would any worker want to "revolt?"

Wow. Which America do you live in? The one with all the happy homeless people, I guess. Where everyone is in love with their minimum wage jobs, thinks their level of personal debt is just fine, and doesn't worry about paying their hospital bills if they get sick. I guess noone in your USA protests the government or goes on strike for better working conditions, either.

I think, if anything, conditions in the US show that Marx was right. To me, anyway, it shows all the signs of an advanced capitalist country in decay. One look at the latest "jobless recovery" ( or is it "job-loss" now) should be proof enough.

jon.

[Ned]

Yeah, jon, the America you live in is the America of communist propaganda.

[Agathon]

The CPA's list of future candidates for "re-education" gulags.

Ned
MrFun
Ogie

[Ned]

Originally posted by Agathon
The CPA's list of future candidates for "re-education" gulags.

Ned
MrFun
Ogie

I am truly honored!

[joncha]

Originally posted by Ned
Yeah, jon, the America you live in is the America of communist propaganda.

You're right, I admit it. Us commies made up the rumours about homelessness and poverty and unemployment to scare all the red-blooded, god-fearing Americans. None of it really exists. Please remain calm. There is nothing to fear. The Department of Homeland Security is taking care of everything.

jon.

[Ned]

Jon, and here we have a glimpse of life in a communist paradise:

Girls for Sale
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: January 17, 2004





Naka Nathaniel/NYTimes.com
Srey Mom


OIPET, Cambodia

One thinks of slavery as an evil confined to musty sepia photographs. But there are 21st-century versions of slaves as well, girls like Srey Neth.

I met Srey Neth, a lovely, giggly wisp of a teenager, here in the wild smuggling town of Poipet in northwestern Cambodia. Girls here are bought and sold, but there is an important difference compared with the 19th century: many of these modern slaves will be dead of AIDS by their 20's.

Some 700,000 people are trafficked around the world each year, many of them just girls. They form part of what I believe will be the paramount moral challenge we will face in this century: to address the brutality that is the lot of so many women in the developing world. Yet it's an issue that gets little attention and that most American women's groups have done shamefully little to address.

Poipet, 220 miles on bouncy roads from Phnom Penh, is a dusty collection of dirt alleys lined with brothels, where teenage girls clutch at any man walking by. It has a reputation as one of the wildest places in Cambodia, an anything-goes town ruled by drugs, gangs, gambling and prostitution.

The only way to have access to the girls is to appear to be a customer. So I put out the word that I wanted to meet young girls and stayed at the seedy $8-a-night Phnom Pich Guest House — and a woman who is a pimp soon brought Srey Neth to my room.

Srey Neth claimed to be 18 but looked several years younger. She insisted at first (through my Khmer interpreter) that she was free and not controlled by the guesthouse. But soon she told her real story: a female cousin had arranged her sale and taken her to the guesthouse. Now she was sharing a room with three other prostitutes, and they were all pimped to guests.

"I can walk around in Poipet, but only with a close relative of the owner," she said. "They keep me under close watch.They do not let me go out alone. They're afraid I would run away."

Why not try to escape at night?

"They would get me back, and something bad would happen. Maybe a beating. I heard that when a group of girls tried to escape, they locked them in the rooms and beat them up."

"What about the police?" I asked. "Couldn't you call out to the police for help?"

"The police wouldn't help me because they get bribes from the brothel owners," Srey Neth said, adding that senior police officials had come to the guesthouse for sex with her.

I asked Srey Neth how much it would cost to buy her freedom. She named an amount equivalent to $150.

"Do you really want to leave?" I asked. "Are you sure you wouldn't come back to this?"

She had been watching TV and listlessly answering my questions. Now she turned abruptly and snorted. "This is a hell," she said sharply, speaking with passion for the first time. "You think I want to do this?"

Another girl, Srey Mom, grabbed at me as I walked down the street. She wouldn't let go, tugging me toward the inner depths of her brothel — but she looked so young and pitiable that I couldn't help thinking that she really wanted me to tug her away.

So I did. I paid the owner $8 to spring her for the evening and then took her away for an interview.

The owner let Srey Mom go out unsupervised, it turned out, partly because she had been a prostitute for several years and was trusted to return — and partly because her dark complexion meant that she was of little value anyway. The brothel sold her to men for just $2.50, compared with the $10 commanded by the lighter-skinned Srey Neth.

I asked Srey Mom what her freedom would cost. Payment of about $70 in debts to her brothel owner, she said. Two girls in her brothel had been freed after they found boyfriends who paid their debts, she said, and she spoke of her longing to see her sisters and the rest of her family in her village on the other side of Cambodia.

"Do you really want to leave the brothel?" I asked.

"I love myself," she answered simply. "I do not want to let my life be destroyed by what I'm doing now."

That's when I made a firm decision I'd been toying with for some time: I would try to buy freedom for these two girls and return them to their families. I'll tell you in my column on Wednesday what happens next.

[Ramo]

I don't want to interrupt your hallucinations Ned, but Cambodia is a capitalist society nowadays. In fact, it's a [constitutional] monarchy.

[Kidlicious]

The Marxist theory of the business cycle is very accurate for the recent past. You have the Asian Financial Crisis, Japanese Deflationary Recession, recent recession in the US, and what is happening now in China. All of these were caused by over-investment and improvements in productivity.

The enormous power, inherent in the factory system, of expanding by jumps, and the dependence of that system on the markets of the world, necessarily beget feverish production, followed by over-filling of the markets, whereupon contraction of the markets brings on crippling of production. The life of modern industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation. The uncertainty and instability to which machinery subjects the employment, and consequently the conditions of existence, of the operatives become normal, owing to these periodic changes of the industrial cycle. Except in the periods of prosperity, there rages between the capitalists the most furious combat for the share of each in the markets. This share is directly proportional to the cheapness of the. product. Besides the rivalry that this struggle begets in the application of improved machinery for replacing labour-power, and of new methods of production, there also comes a time in every industrial cycle, when a forcible reduction of wages beneath the value of labour-power, is attempted for the purpose of cheapening commodities.

A necessary condition, therefore, to the growth of the number of factory hands, is a proportionally much more rapid growth of the amount of capital invested in mills. This growth, however, is conditioned by the ebb and flow of the industrial cycle. It is, besides, constantly interrupted by the technical progress that at one time virtually supplies the place of new workmen, at another, actually displaces old ones. This qualitative change in mechanical industry continually discharges hands from the factory, or shuts its doors against the fresh stream of recruits, while the purely quantitative extension of the factories absorbs not only the men thrown out of work, but also fresh contingents. The workpeople are thus continually both repelled and attracted, hustled from pillar to post, while, at the same time, constant changes take place in the sex, age, and skill of the levies.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
Within that context I agree. Within the context of it being an essential need to be sociable, I disagree.

Man is a social being- hermits leave nothing behind.

[Ben Kenobi]

Hey Aggie:

Why do you leave me off the list of those who need to face commie re-education? are Canadians somehow exempt?

[Imran Siddiqui]

If you're in a competitive industry, you're in the wrong industry, because there isn't much profit there.

Most industries are competitive, where the profit on each unit is very small. Bigger companies make much more money (of course) because they can make more, but smaller companies can still compete.

For example, the pen industry has small profits and there ain't anything you can do about that.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Ned
Yeah, jon, the America you live in is the America of communist propaganda.

Ned, check out the Gini Index of the USA for the last 30 years or so.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Most industries are competitive, where the profit on each unit is very small. Bigger companies make much more money (of course) because they can make more, but smaller companies can still compete.

For example, the pen industry has small profits and there ain't anything you can do about that.

That's why now they are trying branding and marketing, so they can covert from a competitive market to a monopolist market. Just look at Louis Vuitton -- that products are unimpressive, but people flock to it to pay through their noses.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by Agathon
The CPA's list of future candidates for "re-education" gulags.

Ned
MrFun
Ogie

Looks like I'm gonna be lined up and just shot.

Yet another in my long list of "jokes Commies make about killing/imprisoning people." GePap, Spiffor, you paying attention?

[GePap]

Originally posted by JohnT


Looks like I'm gonna be lined up and just shot.

Yet another in my long list of "jokes Commies make about killing/imprisoning people." GePap, Spiffor, you paying attention?

Paying attention to? That Agathon goes to far? That is old news man, old news.

I am curious, why just Spiff and I?