• Book review of the communist manifesto
    304 replies, posted
[QUOTE=tomcat13;23190401] It isn't even really good in theory. Even in theory it requires some pretty bizarre restrictions on personal freedom.[/QUOTE] Bullshit. Though I can't argue because you haven't explained. I can guarantee you believe it requires restrictions on freedom because you have little understanding of marxism or reading ability (or both actually), as your next quote proves. [quote=tomcat13;434343]I still see you're working your labor theory of value hocus pocus so I guess that's my que to respond. Yes there is a relationship between labor and price. But the value of an object a laborer produces does not depend exclusively on the amount of labor he puts into it. It depends on the value that the buyer is willing to pay for it. A worker's products are worth nothing if nobody is willing to buy it. Regardless of what type of machines or how many hours he puts into its production. Everything derives its value from the mutually agreed upon prices by buyers and sellers. Picasso's paintings would be worth nothing if nobody wanted to buy them. But because the demand for his paintings is so high, and the number of paintings he made is so low, the price is greater than what most of us will make in a lifetime. It's that simple. It has very little to do with how long he spent on his paintings, what type of canvas he used, or the quality of his paintbrushes and paints. It's supply and demand pure and simple. Furthermore, if this Ferrari has no use, then why will people pay often hundreds of thousands of dollars for one? Why will people shell out money for tickets to a formula one race to watch a bunch of "worthless" as you call them, cars race around a track? You are ascribing your own personal value system upon objects that other people clearly do value.[/QUOTE] Did you even read my post or did you just see that I was arguing pro-LTV and instantly replied? Because this is one big restatement of Novistador's argument. If you did read my post, you would have understood the difference between price and value, which your [i]whole[/i] argument, just like Novistador's, is based on. So, sorry I'm not going to reiterate the same exact argument for you. I'll let Marx do that for me. [quote=Wage Labour and Capital Ch.2;434343] By what is the price of a commodity determined? By the competition between buyers and sellers, by the relation of the demand to the supply, of the call to the offer. The competition by which the price of a commodity is determined is threefold. The same commodity is offered for sale by various sellers. Whoever sells commodities of the same quality most cheaply, is sure to drive the other sellers from the field and to secure the greatest market for himself. The sellers therefore fight among themselves for the sales, for the market. Each one of them wishes to sell, and to sell as much as possible, and if possible to sell alone, to the exclusion of all other sellers. Each one sells cheaper than the other. Thus there takes place a competition among the sellers which forces down the price of the commodities offered by them. But there is also a competition among the buyers; this upon its side causes the price of the proffered commodities to rise. Finally, there is competition between the buyers and the sellers: these wish to purchase as cheaply as possible, those to sell as dearly as possible. The result of this competition between buyers and sellers will depend upon the relations between the two above-mentioned camps of competitors – i.e., upon whether the competition in the army of sellers is stronger. Industry leads two great armies into the field against each other, and each of these again is engaged in a battle among its own troops in its own ranks. The army among whose troops there is less fighting, carries off the victory over the opposing host. Let us suppose that there are 100 bales of cotton in the market and at the same time purchasers for 1,000 bales of cotton. In this case, the demand is 10 times greater than the supply. Competition among the buyers, then, will be very strong; each of them tries to get hold of one bale, if possible, of the whole 100 bales. This example is no arbitrary supposition. In the history of commerce we have experienced periods of scarcity of cotton, when some capitalists united together and sought to buy up not 100 bales, but the whole cotton supply of the world. In the given case, then, one buyer seeks to drive the others from the field by offering a relatively higher price for the bales of cotton. The cotton sellers, who perceive the troops of the enemy in the most violent contention among themselves, and who therefore are fully assured of the sale of their whole 100 bales, will beware of pulling one another's hair in order to force down the price of cotton at the very moment in which their opponents race with one another to screw it up high. So, all of a sudden, peace reigns in the army of sellers. They stand opposed to the buyers like one man, fold their arms in philosophic contentment and their claims would find no limit did not the offers of even the most importunate of buyers have a very definite limit. If, then, the supply of a commodity is less than the demand for it, competition among the sellers is very slight, or there may be none at all among them. In the same proportion in which this competition decreases, the competition among the buyers increases. Result: a more or less considerable rise in the prices of commodities. It is well known that the opposite case, with the opposite result, happens more frequently. Great excess of supply over demand; desperate competition among the sellers, and a lack of buyers; forced sales of commodities at ridiculously low prices. But what is a rise, and what a fall of prices? What is a high and what a low price? A grain of sand is high when examined through a microscope, and a tower is low when compared with a mountain. And if the price is determined by the relation of supply and demand, by what is the relation of supply and demand determined? Let us turn to the first worthy citizen we meet. He will not hesitate one moment, but, like Alexander the Great, will cut this metaphysical knot with his multiplication table. He will say to us: "If the production of the commodities which I sell has cost me 100 pounds, and out of the sale of these goods I make 110 pounds – within the year, you understand – that's an honest, sound, reasonable profit. But if in the exchange I receive 120 or 130 pounds, that's a higher profit; and if I should get as much as 200 pounds, that would be an extraordinary, and enormous profit." What is it, then, that serves this citizen as the standard of his profit? The cost of the production of his commodities. If in exchange for these goods he receives a quantity of other goods whose production has cost less, he has lost. If he receives in exchange for his goods a quantity of other goods whose production has cost more, he has gained. And he reckons the falling or rising of the profit according to the degree at which the exchange value of his goods stands, whether above or below his zero – the cost of production. [/quote] This part, however, has not been addressed in this thread: [quote=tomcat13;43434]Furthermore, if this Ferrari has no use, then why will people pay often hundreds of thousands of dollars for one? Why will people shell out money for tickets to a formula one race to watch a bunch of "worthless" as you call them, cars race around a track? You are ascribing your own personal value system upon objects that other people clearly do value.[/quote] First, I never said it had no use. I said it was [i]comparatively[/i] (another word for relatively, if you don't know) useless compared to construction work, which is priced significantly less. It was part of the point that a seller prices things according to their cost of production, not based on use value, which is how an individual buyer views a product. This is why, ironically, the marginal theory of value is actually compatible with the labor theory of value. They don't even deal with each other. [quote=tomcat13;323232]But they did happen under socialism. [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War[/url] "Socialist Republic of Vietnam" invades "Democratic Kampuchea" which sparks a war with the "People's Republic of China". Every single side in that war was Pro-Marxist. That Marxism will somehow solve all the worlds problems and stop all the wars is probably the biggest farce propagated by communists ever. It's like you really do think that if you had the power to socially re-engineer society all of the bloodshed and disagreements will magically go away. It's unbelievably naive.[/quote] This argument is so full of holes. China by the sino-vietnamese war had already embraced Deng Xiaoping reforms and abandoned any cause for socialism. Its foreign policy was not driven by a cause for world revolution, but by state-capitalist, colonialist interests. It aligned itself with the US because of the threat the USSR posed to its influence (the exact reason for the sino-vietnamese war, cambodia was a chinese ally while vietnam was a soviet ally), it supported Pinochet and other third war right-wing dictators because they were opposed to the 'social-imperialism' (how ironic) of the USSR, and continued to work hard to fracture the 'social-imperialist' communist movement in the world all the way until the end of the cold war. The conflict between vietnam and china was the classic case of capitalist imperialism vs. socialist revolutionaries. And as for the vietnamese invasion of cambodia, there was nothing wrong with it. It was no feud between socialist countries. Pol pot was an anti-industrial agrarianist and anti-intellectual that wanted to transform cambodia into what it was 500 years ago, a peasant society that he believed was 'pure'. There was nothing socialist with his ideas, and if you think so it only demonstrates your immense ignorance of marxist theory. And let's not forget who called Pol pot's government the 'legitimate government' after its exile from cambodia, the US. lmao, we [i]DO[/i] have the power to re-engineer society to kill off old feuds, and we [i]HAVE[/i]. It's really funny you bring this up because it's such a bad position to take. the USSR united many different ethnicities and nationalities despite attempts by the entente and later the nazis and their collaborators to divide them. This is also despite the fact that the USSR encouraged the local SSR's culture. They even handed out autonomy to small ethnicities and nationalities, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_oblasts_of_the_Soviet_Union]here's a list of them[/url]. The ethnic conflict russia endures today only appeared after the collapse of the USSR. People considered themselves, for example, both soviet and armenian. Or both soviet and ukrainians. 'Soviet' was an identity that brought together people of all kinds. Yugoslavia ended centuries old ethnic conflict even with a gory re-opening of the wounds prior during WW2 and built a yugoslav identity. For cuba, racism has been dead since the 60s. This is contrary to what race relations were prior to 1959, much closer to that of the US's. Even the hardly socialist buffer states of the warsaw pact put an end to old conflicts and stigmas, especially slavophobia and the far-right strains of nationalism that started WW2, much more to the degree then west germany the US, who put nazis to work. None of this can be said about, say, the US whom can't seem to handle more then one race or ethnicity without having a significant prejudice problem. Civil rights were declared for all peoples since the USSR's inception. The US? Well it took us 50 years to get rid of racist [i]slavery[/i] for one, then another 100 years to get rid of segregation and actually make them officially equal. This is all while minorities were under attack by america's huge number of racists. Then we have issues with immigrants which we've been having for at least a hundred years, despite the fact that we prize ourself as a 'melting pot' (something we've clearly been beat at). The rest of the west, which is supposed to be the pride of capitalism, is no exception. Xenophobia is the big one, and it's been around in different forms for also a ridiculous long time. Even if it was between europeans! Communists have always been big players in civil rights and anti-racism. Sorry, we really do have you beat here.
[QUOTE=Conscript;23192410]Bullshit. Though I can't argue because you haven't explained. I can guarantee you believe it requires restrictions on freedom because you have little understanding of marxism, as your next quote proves.[/QUOTE] Who decides what has value and what does not? [quote]By what is the price of a commodity determined? By the competition between buyers and sellers, by the relation of the demand to the supply, of the call to the offer. The competition by which the price of a commodity is determined is threefold. The same commodity is offered for sale by various sellers. Whoever sells commodities of the same quality most cheaply, is sure to drive the other sellers from the field and to secure the greatest market for himself. The sellers therefore fight among themselves for the sales, for the market. Each one of them wishes to sell, and to sell as much as possible, and if possible to sell alone, to the exclusion of all other sellers. Each one sells cheaper than the other. Thus there takes place a competition among the sellers which forces down the price of the commodities offered by them. But there is also a competition among the buyers; this upon its side causes the price of the proffered commodities to rise. Finally, there is competition between the buyers and the sellers: these wish to purchase as cheaply as possible, those to sell as dearly as possible. The result of this competition between buyers and sellers will depend upon the relations between the two above-mentioned camps of competitors – i.e., upon whether the competition in the army of sellers is stronger. Industry leads two great armies into the field against each other, and each of these again is engaged in a battle among its own troops in its own ranks. The army among whose troops there is less fighting, carries off the victory over the opposing host. Let us suppose that there are 100 bales of cotton in the market and at the same time purchasers for 1,000 bales of cotton. In this case, the demand is 10 times greater than the supply. Competition among the buyers, then, will be very strong; each of them tries to get hold of one bale, if possible, of the whole 100 bales. This example is no arbitrary supposition. In the history of commerce we have experienced periods of scarcity of cotton, when some capitalists united together and sought to buy up not 100 bales, but the whole cotton supply of the world. In the given case, then, one buyer seeks to drive the others from the field by offering a relatively higher price for the bales of cotton. The cotton sellers, who perceive the troops of the enemy in the most violent contention among themselves, and who therefore are fully assured of the sale of their whole 100 bales, will beware of pulling one another's hair in order to force down the price of cotton at the very moment in which their opponents race with one another to screw it up high. So, all of a sudden, peace reigns in the army of sellers. They stand opposed to the buyers like one man, fold their arms in philosophic contentment and their claims would find no limit did not the offers of even the most importunate of buyers have a very definite limit. If, then, the supply of a commodity is less than the demand for it, competition among the sellers is very slight, or there may be none at all among them. In the same proportion in which this competition decreases, the competition among the buyers increases. Result: a more or less considerable rise in the prices of commodities. It is well known that the opposite case, with the opposite result, happens more frequently. Great excess of supply over demand; desperate competition among the sellers, and a lack of buyers; forced sales of commodities at ridiculously low prices. But what is a rise, and what a fall of prices? What is a high and what a low price? A grain of sand is high when examined through a microscope, and a tower is low when compared with a mountain. And if the price is determined by the relation of supply and demand, by what is the relation of supply and demand determined? Let us turn to the first worthy citizen we meet. He will not hesitate one moment, but, like Alexander the Great, will cut this metaphysical knot with his multiplication table. He will say to us: "If the production of the commodities which I sell has cost me 100 pounds, and out of the sale of these goods I make 110 pounds – within the year, you understand – that's an honest, sound, reasonable profit. But if in the exchange I receive 120 or 130 pounds, that's a higher profit; and if I should get as much as 200 pounds, that would be an extraordinary, and enormous profit." What is it, then, that serves this citizen as the standard of his profit? The cost of the production of his commodities. If in exchange for these goods he receives a quantity of other goods whose production has cost less, he has lost. If he receives in exchange for his goods a quantity of other goods whose production has cost more, he has gained. And he reckons the falling or rising of the profit according to the degree at which the exchange value of his goods stands, whether above or below his zero – the cost of production.[/quote] This entire quote is simply Marx explaining that prices go up during a shortage and fall during a surplus. Economics 101, anybody? Though I find it interesting he doesn't mention that when prices rise to the point were price exceeds the Average Total Cost that there is profit to be made, and that seeing this, more capital will be invested in the production of said good and more and more producers and sellers will shift to producing said good until the price reaches equilibrium once again and there is no more profit to be made. Then they will leave the market and produce less of it until Price and ATC reach equilibrium. When price falls below the ATC, then sellers and producers leave the market until the price goes up again. Pretty simple. A free market responds to changes in supply and demand. There is no need to introduce rationing because over consumption carries a price. But if somebody does want to over consume they are free to do so as long as they pay that price. Things that people don't want don't get produced. Things that people do want, get produced. Simple as that. There is no need to install a soviet commisar to plan the economy. The price system manages production. [quote]This part, however, has not been addressed in this thread: First, I never said it had no use. I said it was [I]comparatively[/I] (another word for relatively, if you don't know) useless compared to construction work, which is priced significantly less. It was part of the point that a seller prices things according to their cost of production, not based on use value, which is how an individual buyer views a product.[/quote] I still fail to see how you are deciding the Ferrari has less use. Explain. [quote]This is why, ironically, the marginal theory of value is actually compatible with the labor theory of value. They don't even deal with each other.[/quote] Sure they do. LTV states that things have value because work goes into them. Marginal Utility states that things have value because they satisfy an individuals wants or needs. It's a pretty clear difference.
[QUOTE=tomcat13;23193414]Who decides what has value and what does not?[/quote] What do you mean? Nobody has to decide 'what' has value as it already does. [QUOTE=tomcat13;23193414]This entire quote is simply Marx explaining that prices go up during a shortage and fall during a surplus. Economics 101, anybody?[/quote] Wow you didn't fucking read it at all, or are just relying on what you memory is of what you skimmed last time haha. Probably the latter because you put hardly any effort in your post He starts out explaining how price is determined (relation of supply and demand), then explains how the relation of supply and demand is determined (cost of production). Then, which I didn't add to the quote but you can read the rest [url=http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch03.htm]here[/url], explains how cost of production is determined by the amount of labor-time put in to producing a product. Quite simple really, though you're acting like it's too much for you (is it?) [QUOTE=tomcat13;23193414]Though I find it interesting he doesn't mention that when prices rise to the point were price exceeds the Average Total Cost that there is profit to be made,[/quote] yes he does, actually. just not in the excerpt [quote=Wage Labor & Capital Ch.7]The selling price of the commodities produced by the worker is divided, from the point of view of the capitalist, into three parts: First, the replacement of the price of the raw materials advanced by him, in addition to the replacement of the wear and tear of the tools, machines, and other instruments of labor likewise advanced by him; Second, the replacement of the wages advanced; and [b]Third, the surplus leftover – i.e., the profit of the capitalist.[/b][/quote] [QUOTE=tomcat13;23193414]and that seeing this, more capital will be invested in the production of said good and more and more producers and sellers will shift to producing said good until the price reaches equilibrium once again and there is no more profit to be made. Then they will leave the market and produce less of it until Price and ATC reach equilibrium. When price falls below the ATC, then sellers and producers leave the market until the price goes up again. [/quote] You just explained everything he did in different words. Thanks. [QUOTE=tomcat13;23193414]Pretty simple. A free market responds to changes in supply and demand. There is no need to introduce rationing because over consumption carries a price. But if somebody does want to over consume they are free to do so as long as they pay that price. Things that people don't want don't get produced. Things that people do want, get produced. Simple as that. There is no need to install a soviet commisar to plan the economy. The price system manages production.[/quote] A free market is a form of rationing. Only people with enough money can buy something. People are free to over-consume in a planned economy, as long as they work hard enough. This is possible in capitalism, but not guaranteed and usually not the case for many people. Every economic system that does not have abundance of resources (i.e. anything that's not communism) has a system of rationing in place. [QUOTE=tomcat13;23193414]Sure they do. LTV states that things have value because work goes into them. Marginal Utility states that things have value because they satisfy an individuals wants or needs. It's a pretty clear difference.[/QUOTE] LTV deals with social determination of value (logically through labor as that determines availability). MTV deals with individual determination of value and the LTV leaves space for it as stated in [url=http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4]Marx's capital[/url] that all commodities have a value based on how important it is to society. So once again you only have this argument because you have 0 understanding of the LTV. You probably just read some marginalist's argument against the LTV which confused use value with exchange value, something marxism distinguishes between. To sum it up, you argument fails because [quote=Contribution to the critique of political economy Ch. 1;434343]"[b]As exchange-values[/b], all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour time." [/quote] Marx never argued that the amount of labor-time put into something determines its value to an individual. That's yet another lie, just like 'all people are paid the same no matter what'. [editline]10:24PM[/editline] god this thread is doomed to go on for eternity
[quote]This argument is so full of holes. China by the sino-vietnamese war had already embraced Deng Xiaoping reforms and abandoned any cause for socialism. Its foreign policy was not driven by a cause for world revolution, but by state-capitalist, colonialist interests. It aligned itself with the US because of the threat the USSR posed to its influence (the exact reason for the sino-vietnamese war, cambodia was a chinese ally while vietnam was a soviet ally), it supported Pinochet and other third war right-wing dictators because they were opposed to the 'social-imperialism' (how ironic) of the USSR, and continued to work hard to fracture the 'social-imperialist' communist movement in the world all the way until the end of the cold war. [/quote] China abandoned socialism because it was causing everybody to fucking starve to death. They didn't magically embrace capitalism. They had to because everybody was fucking dying under their previous economic experiments. Ironically even Vietnam and Cuba today have been forced to allow certain types of private property because their controlled markets have left them in the fucking stoneage by comparison. Regardless, the split between the USSR and the PRC started long before China reformed its markets. They disagreed from the very beginning over who was "doing it right" in regards to "true" socialism. Mao considered Soviet Socialism to be not true socialism, Stalin Considered Mao's socialism to not be "true socialism" and Trotskyists around the world considered them both to not be "true" socialism. Socialists can never agree on what true socialism is, let alone even come close to achieving it. When they aren't killing/imprisoning capitalists/bourgoisie/reactionaries/class enemies, they are killing/imprisoning each other over whose form of socialism is more correct. [quote]The conflict between vietnam and china was the classic case of capitalist imperialism vs. socialist revolutionaries. And as for the vietnamese invasion of cambodia, there was nothing wrong with it. It was no feud between socialist countries. Pol pot was an anti-industrial agrarianist and anti-intellectual that wanted to transform cambodia into what it was 500 years ago, a peasant society that he believed was 'pure'. There was nothing socialist with his ideas, and if you think so it only demonstrates your immense ignorance of marxist theory. [/quote]He nationalized all industry, abolished private property, outlawed banking, outlawed currency, outlawed all religion, and forced everybody onto farming collectives. He declared everything else to be useless and unnecessary. There is nothing socialist in nature here? Does a right wing paramilitary group bent on ridding society of jews and minorities have no similarities with the ideas of national socialism? [quote]And let's not forget who called Pol pot's government the 'legitimate government' after its exile from cambodia, the US. [/quote] The US did not endorse Pol Pot, in fact the CIA was trying to assassinate him. So was teh KGB, ironically. The UN didn't want to recognize the government that Vietnam installed in Cambodia because it didn't want to legitimize the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. Had nothing to do with endorsing Pol Pot. [quote]lmao, we [I]DO[/I] have the power to re-engineer society to kill off old feuds, and we [I]HAVE[/I]. It's really funny you bring this up because it's such a bad position to take.[/quote]Not democratically you can't. I'm sure we could eliminate racism if we eliminated all races except one. Or forced everybody to become the same race. But we'd have to kill a few billion people to do it and cause untold suffering and devastation. [quote]the USSR united many different ethnicities and nationalities despite attempts by the entente and later the nazis and their collaborators to divide them. This is also despite the fact that the USSR encouraged the local SSR's culture. They even handed out autonomy to small ethnicities and nationalities, [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_oblasts_of_the_Soviet_Union"]here's a list of them[/URL]. The ethnic conflict russia endures today only appeared after the collapse of the USSR. People considered themselves, for example, both soviet and armenian. Or both soviet and ukrainians. 'Soviet' was an identity that brought together people of all kinds.[/quote] No, just no. The USSR had a long history of oppressing minorities within their sphere of influence. Hell nearly "350,000 Poles, ethnic Germans, Koreans, and other minorities suspected of being hostile to the Soviet Government were killed from 1940-1945 alone.Ukrainians, Poles, Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tartars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balskars, Karachavs, Meskhethian Turks, Finns, Bulgarians, Greeks, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Jews. Large numbers of Kulaks, regardless of their nationality, were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia." Jews and Christians were arrested and deported en masse to siberia. Churchs and synagogues were attacked, burned and destroyed. Anti-Semitism was rampant. [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot[/URL] Yep, killing and resettling ethnic minorities is a great way of treating people. How is this any different from what the US did with the natives during the 19th century? It's not. It's the same shit. [quote]Yugoslavia ended centuries old ethnic conflict even with a gory re-opening of the wounds prior during WW2 and built a yugoslav identity.[/quote]Are you for real? [URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslavia#Ethnic_tensions_and_the_economic_crisis[/URL] [URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Spring[/URL] The ethnic "peace" that you seem to believe existed was enforced with arrests, executions, and the banning of the right to assemble. All nationalist movements were heavily persecuted. Even all this didn't stop ethnic divisions and violence from occurring. [quote]For cuba, racism has been dead since the 60s. This is contrary to what race relations were prior to 1959, much closer to that of the US's.[/quote] I'm trying to figure out if you're just flat out lying or if you're naive. The picture of Cuba that you seem to have in your head seems to be a far cry from the way Cubans see it. [URL]http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/part4/index.html[/URL] [URL]http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=7b4ef8e52790034e043a37d170243f0f[/URL] [URL]http://www.the-latest.com/why-cubas-white-leaders-feel-threatened-by-obama[/URL] [URL]http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/7/11/20835.shtml[/URL] Of course the commies who control Cuba will tell you differently. [quote]Even the hardly socialist buffer states of the warsaw pact put an end to old conflicts and stigmas, especially slavophobia and the far-right strains of nationalism that started WW2, much more to the degree then west germany the US, who put nazis to work.[/quote] The USSR put former Nazis to work too. In work camps and siberian gulags. They ended slavophobia and replaced it with Germanophobia. Ethnic Germans were everything from intimidated to forcefully expelled from almost all countries under soviet influence, regardless of their political affiliation. [URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Germans_after_World_War_II[/URL] They raped en masse German women. [URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_rape_of_German_women_by_Soviet_Red_Army[/URL] The Soviets murdered thousands of politicians, military leaders, and class enemies in their territories, starting during the war and continuing afterwards. [URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre[/URL] [quote]None of this can be said about, say, the US whom can't seem to handle more then one race or ethnicity without having a significant prejudice problem. Civil rights were declared for all peoples since the USSR's inception. The US? Well it took us 50 years to get rid of racist [I]slavery[/I] for one, then another 100 years to get rid of segregation and actually make them officially equal. This is all while minorities were under attack by america's huge number of racists. Then we have issues with immigrants which we've been having for at least a hundred years, despite the fact that we prize ourself as a 'melting pot' (something we've clearly been beat at). [/quote] To the contrary we have one of the most ethnically mixed cultures in the entire world and we aren't resorting to genocide. Show me a country that is ethnically and racially diverse and is completely free of discrimination and racism. Differences cause disagreements. Disagreements cause conflicts. Conflicts often turn to violence. That's the price we pay for diversity. But the only other option is to eliminate diversity and force everybody to be the same, which is far worse. [quote]The rest of the west, which is supposed to be the pride of capitalism, is no exception. Xenophobia is the big one, and it's been around in different forms for also a ridiculous long time. Even if it was between europeans! Communists have always been big players in civil rights and anti-racism. Sorry, we really do have you beat here. [/quote] No you really don't. [editline]08:26PM[/editline] [QUOTE=Conscript;23193922]What do you mean? Nobody has to decide 'what' has value as it already does.[/QUOTE] How do you know it has value? What is the value of a chair? Of a car? Of a house? How do you arrive at its value? [quote]He starts out explaining how price is determined (relation of supply and demand), then explains how the relation of supply and demand is determined (cost of production). Then, which I didn't add to the quote but you can read the rest [URL="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch03.htm"]here[/URL], explains how cost of production is determined by the amount of labor-time put in to producing a product. Quite simple really, though you're acting like it's too much for you (is it?) [/quote]There's nothing profound about this. [quote]A free market is a form of rationing.[/quote]This is true. [quote]Only people with enough money can buy something.[/quote] This is also true of socialism. Unless you are suggesting that people will be getting something for nothing. [quote]People are free to over-consume in a planned economy, as long as they work hard enough.[/quote] Who decides how much and how? [quote]This is possible in capitalism, but not guaranteed and usually not the case for many people.[/quote]Anybody who can afford to overconsume can overconsume. [quote]Every economic system that does not have abundance of resources (i.e. anything that's not communism) has a system of rationing in place. [/quote] so essentially a post scarcity society is required for communism? You're getting into the realm of science fiction now. [quote]LTV deals with social determination of value (logically through labor as that determines availability). MTV deals with individual determination of value and the LTV leaves space for it as stated in [URL="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4"]Marx's capital[/URL] that all commodities have a value based on how important it is to society. [/quote] How does "society" ascribe value to something? [quote]So once again you only have this argument because you have 0 understanding of the LTV. You probably just read some marginalist's argument against the LTV which confused use value with exchange value, something marxism distinguishes between. To sum it up, you argument fails because Marx never argued that the amount of labor-time put into something determines its value to an individual. That's yet another lie, just like 'all people are paid the same no matter what'.[/quote]Well then, let me put it in the form of a simple question. Which has more value, Diamonds or Water?
[QUOTE=tomcat13;23190401] It isn't even really good in theory. Even in theory it requires some pretty bizarre restrictions on personal freedom.[/QUOTE] you keep fucking saying this and you've stated one, property, and even then you fucking took that out of context
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