stupid Americans: Socialism is not Communism

Maybe capitalism should be peppered with a good shake of communism.

Stupid world, dictators and tyrants do not care what political party they are in.



The blood is on their hands, and we pay the price in increased radicalism, tanked economies, social injustice, and so much more.





They spent five decades teaching us that anyone who gave to the poor was a communist, and then to pretend Jesus didnt spend his whole life telling people to do just that.

Maybe capitalism should be peppered with a good shake of communism.

The goal of socialism is communism.

- Vladimir Lenin

[link to www.brainyquote.com]

Yeah and Lenin is dead. Many European countries have been governed by socialist leaders without wishing to be communist.

Thanx, 294651

THIS NEEDS ITS OWN THREAD

Fellow Travellors:

I think that when Americans express dislike of socialism it is so tied in to the failed Soviet and Chinese social experiments that what they really fear is rule by a small, secretive elite, loss of freedom, and societal direction being dictated from the top, and an unfair percentage of earned wealth, individual or family, being taken away as taxes.

In other words: the current order in America?
Getting there...

I'd worry about that classism and ruling elite that so many deny, which has always been in America.

(You Yanks should have strung-up that Connecticut-born Yale/Harvard boy George W. Bush for what he did to your freedoms. And I heard that he left dirty pajamas on the floor and toothpaste in the sink, and even absconded with the last role of toilet paper when he left the White House.)

buh... the government doesnt control anyone in socialism, the people run...
Also for socialism to work everyone has to work... its not like 2 people work so 4 people can sit around and do nothing, everyone works and helps improve the lives of eachother which creates a better community. This is why socialism will never work in America unless the slackers are removed from the community.

You can call it whatever the fuck you want but it is NOT American so FUCK OFF

Socialism -
System of social organization in which private property and the distribution of income are subject to social control; also, the political movements aimed at putting that system into practice. Because "social control" may be interpreted in widely diverging ways, socialism ranges from statist to libertarian, from Marxist to liberal. The term was first used to describe the doctrines of Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen, who emphasized noncoercive communities of people working noncompetitively for the spiritual and physical well-being of all (see utopian socialism). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, seeing socialism as a transition state between capitalism and communism, appropriated what they found useful in socialist movements to develop their "scientific socialism." In the 20th century, the Soviet Union was the principal model of strictly centralized socialism, while Sweden and Denmark were well-known for their non-communist socialism.

Communism -
In its broadest meaning communism describes a society in which all its members jointly (communally) own its resources and in which the society's wealth and products are distributed equally to everyone. The term has been applied to premodern social and political constructs, such as communal societies propounded in Plato's Republic and in Thomas More's Utopia; to proposals of some radicals in the French Revolution of 1787; and to ideal communities advocated by nineteenth-century reformers such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, but none of these systems corresponded fully with the principles of communism.

Most often, communism designates the ultimate good society espoused by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848 and the ideas and Soviet system in twentieth-century Russia associated with Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. The latter usage is a misnomer: Neither Lenin nor later Soviet leaders ever claimed that communism had been established in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, they willingly adopted the label, since it furthered their revolutionary and propagandistic purposes. As a result, in general discussion and writing, the Soviet state and its post-World War II offshoots in Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba were generally called "communist." Correspondingly, leaders of the Soviet Union, of other similarly constituted states, and of revolutionary parties worldwide that adhered to Marxist-Leninist doctrine were known as "communists."

More accurately, however, communism signifies only the very last step in the historical process and the ultimate and highly desirable goal of human development as outlined in Marx's economic, social, and political philosophy. Influenced by egalitarian ideas current in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Marx was outraged by what he saw as the unjust nature of the economic system spawned by the Industrial Revolution, which he called capitalism. Marx and Engels portrayed history as determined inevitably by "scientific" laws, which divided human social evolution into five broad stages: "gentilism," sometimes referred to as "primitive communism," with individuals living in clans and holding property in common; "slavery" based on slave labor; "feudalism" dependent on serf labor; "capitalism," in which entrepreneurs or capitalists exploited workers (the proletariat) and controlled the government; and "socialism," with public ownership replacing private capital and the emergence of a classless society providing justice, equity and freedom for all. Since conflict and class struggle, the mechanism for social change, would not exist in this new order, socialism would be the final stage of history and the highest level of human development.

Marx noted, however, that socialism would have two phases: the lower phase, also known as "socialism," and a higher phase, "communism." The latter would be the ultimate good society benefiting all mankind. In the lower, socialist phase, the whole society would own its productive forces, or the economy, but work would still be valued and paid differentially and distribution of the society's goods and wealth would not yet be equal. To reach the higher, communist phase, two requirements had to be met. First, the productive forces of society, restricted by the capitalists in a vain attempt to prop up their profits, would be liberated, and the economy, hugely expanded by modern scientific and technological inputs, would become capable of producing "a superabundance of goods." This enormous output would permit everyone to have whatever they needed. Second, in counterbalance, an individual's needs would be limited and sensible, because society would develop, through education and by example, "a new-type socialist person." Reoriented individuals would desire only what was truly necessary to sustain life, eschewing ostentation and waste. They would also contribute to the socialist society altruistically, applying their work and varied talents to the common welfare. With the superabundance of goods and the new socialist individual, society could then be organized on the principle: "from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs." Thus, communism would mark an end to coercion, want, and inequality.

Socialism: "noncoercive communities of people working noncompetitively for the spiritual and physical well-being of all..." This could work except for one rather big problem. Not all people are human; that is, some physically lack the qualities of humanness, like compassion, empathy and an interest in another person's well-being. They are psychopaths, and they only have their own interests at heart.

What happens is that as a society ages, these non-humans rise to the top of the ladder, and as they do, they turn something that may have been good into what we live under today in the USA: greedy and unabashed capitalism that has turned into an oligarchy type fascism. The sad thing is that people live under the delusion that we have a democracy, that we are free, that the government always has our interests at heart.

Sounds to me like you just want something for free, or you want to take away from the people that work, typical commie liberal.

And we have lived in a democracy when the country was strong under regan and the bushes.