Communism, Socialism, Capitalism, Nationalism, etc.

[Anonymouse]

Re: Armenian White Nationalism

It is interesting that in your whole rebuttal, not once you posted statistical numbers (with regards to Soviet Union) in order to back up your thesis. As I predicted, you are unable to do such a thing. That is of course because you are wrong, and above all, you know you are wrong.


Thank you for validating my point.

Statistics are meaningless. They don't prove anything for statistics can be used to back up anything. It is as elasic as rubber band. The fact that the Soviet Union collapsed and the fact that its economic system had to rely on Western price inclusion and comparison to world markets is enough of an indictment on how the system failed.

There are many methods used to calculate the human development or the ''standards of living''.

The gross domestic product, as you know, is one of them. That though doesn't mean squats, because the wealth is not equally redistributed (not that you would care). The methods that you mentioned are indeed important factors in the process of measuring the standards of living in a free market oriented economy. You also ignore life the expectancy and the adult literacy.

Wealth distribution is not a factor of what determines standard of living. Only perverse methods and ideas such as communism can confuse the two. Forcing people to give up what they have earned in order to have a supposed "equality" is still unethical. Life expectancy? You whined about numbers and statistics so I am including this study, titled "Reassessing the Standard of Living in the Soviet Union: An Analysis Using Archival and Anthropometric Data. This study refutes the long cherished notion that there was a steady uninterrupted improvement in life expectancy and infant mortality rates. In fact, as the system's cracks became evident, the quality of life gradually diminished especially toward the 80s.

But all of these methods, the one's that you mentioned in your post, are irrelevant and not applicable in the case of Soviet Union, for Soviet Union was not a free market economy.

While the Soviet Union was not entirely a free market economy, it did recognize the need for some market activity and indeed private property, and as mentioned earlier, it did rely on world market prices and comparisons for its own production costs. You cannot have a society without some admission of private property. And the standards I mentioned are all the more applicable for the amount of corruption the Soviet Union bred paled in comparison next to market based economies. Education was not a gaurantor of anything. A nation built on bureacracy doesn't allow for the free developing of individuals and their creative potential. Instead, it heards people into worthless government jobs with little or not chance at upward mobility, income increase based on merit and work ethic.

First of all ''equality'' is an abstract concept and my definition of equality is, of course, the economic one which I believe is possible in a communist society.

The reasons that equality deems an alien concept to you stems from the fact that you don't know what a communist society is.

I know communism more than you can ever imagine. In fact, the whole notion of equality is nonsense because in nature there is no such thing as equality. Equality cannot exist for it is precisely what you mentioned, an abstraction. Even in your esteemed Soviet Union there was no such thing. In a world of complexities, i.e. chaos theory, there can never be room for a static state of sameness. Nothing can ever be the same, because of individual actors. Peoples' intelligence, creativity, characters and capacities as well as strenghts and weaknesses all differ. Peoples' production, income, creativity, eaning power are all based on these individual characteristics. Therefore, there can never be any time or point in time where everything is equal. It is simply unheard of and impossible to demonstrate.

Communism is a stage in human society in which the total amount of productive forces have been maximized to such an extent that supply and demand is not significant enough to aggregate any possibility of making a profit.

That is called building theoretical castles in the sky. No wonder Marxists and communists have no concept of economics or how things work, since they are busy plotting points in air about the way society ought to be, or how society will be in some mythical distant future.

That of course will take eons to realize.

It took the Soviet Union less than a century.

That is some ignorant xxxx. No serious Communist in this world will ever support ''reward those who don't produce''. What we simply say on this issue is that the workers should be paid for what they work.

But how do you know it doesn't reward those who are not productive? You cannot measure that under communism. And what all too often happened, what I remember from my parents' stories and the lives they lived under the Soviet Union, there was alot of inefficiency in the system. Under a system of no competition, innovation or accountability, through time there is a lowering of quality and an increase in corruption and carelessness. Since the people are the supposed government and its a workers' paradise people are guaranteed an income as long as they show that they are working. That is an external point, whether they work efficiently, promptly, reliably, those cannot be measured. Companies cannot determine if they are efficient at what they do, or if their costs outweigh their profits since there is no calculation under socialism.

The more you work, the more you will get paid, but you will be paid the real value of your labor, including the surplus value that is being theft by the employer in the capitalist mode of production.

This is our fundamental difference. My perception of value is different than yours. The rest of our argument is rather unimportant for me really.

This is where your post took the worst dive. As if you couldn't get any worse in your ignorance of economics, you had to engage in yet more self-flagellation. The beauty of this above piece by you is that you have surrounded yourself in a contradiction, vis a vis value.

So in the first chunk of that paragraph you claim that the more one works the more one will get paid and that one will get paid the "real value". What is the "real value" and who is willing to pay that 'real value"? In your haste you attributed value with as an objective thing.

In your second paragraph you go on to contradict yourself that our fundamental difference is a different perception of values, indicating values' subjectivity. I take it you have not heard of the subjective theory of value.

The reason no one can determine what a "real value" is, is because there is no such thing. It cannot be quantified. In your world, the janitor would get paid his 'real value' but what is that? Being a janitor is a relatively mediocre and easy task. Anyone with a double-digit IQ can be a janitor. There are plenty of janitors thus there is no scarcity (another economic concept foreign to Marxists). People often wonder how basketball players are so overpaid. The reason is that because 1) not everyone can play as good as them and that sort of talent is extremely rare and 2) there are people, companies, sponsors, etc., that are willing to pay for them because they know they are rare and will sell. Why? Because of consumer preference! (yet another foreign concept to Marxists). Why is it that a surgeon gets paid so much money, but teachers do not. Socialists of all stripes whine about this, yet fail to realize the basic idea that values are all subjective. That you may be willing to pay so much money for teachers doesn't correlate with the rest of the people who do not see teachers as a scarcity.

Unless you can demonstrate that all values for all people are always the same for all time, you have no case and you are only in denial, perhaps out of a need to hold fast onto some faint hope of a discredited theory.

That is untrue I am not trying to discredit the Capitalism system. In fact Capitalism exists merely because it works.

But I can assure you that, just like Feudalism, it wont last for long... thanks to the Capitalists.

Prophecies about the future are not scientific much less historical, but are merely prophecies and conjectures. There are many prophecies from the Mayan calendar ending in 2012, to Jesus returning, or Allah or some other such thing. In fact, that is ahistorical.

I know where you are coming from and I know very well what are your views with regards to the economy.

First of Capitalism today is, as you would agree, far from being a ''free-market''. Laissez-faire and free markets are largely idealized concepts and that is due to the inapplicability of any idealized theory of market economy to real world conditions.

Alas ''free-markets'' will always in the end result to monopolies, it is an unavoidable part of the capitalist mode of production.

Actually, that is untrue. A monopoly does not occur when someone obtains a large portion of the market. It occurs when someone uses violence to prevent competitors from entering the market, or to drive out competitors. The classic example is the State. What makes you think that irrational people could ever run a business well enough to obtain a large portion of market-share?

In a genuine free market economy, competitive markets and prices lead to gradual break ups of monopoly. As Austrian economists have pointed out, namely in the case of Standard Oil, it was never even close to being a monopoly as alleged and before the government got its hands on it, it had created many competitors worldwide that it could not possibly have the entire market. The reason is because Standard Oil did not coerce its competitors using violence.

In the private sector there cannot be any monopolies. It is always in the government or public sector because it is always with the use of the government force that monopolies occur. In the private sector consumers do not have to pay any company if they do not want to. It is only when that choice is taken away by government intervention. The following resource should aid you in your understanding of monopolies.

http://www.mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10a.asp

http://www.mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10b.asp

http://www.mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10c.asp

http://www.mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10d.asp

http://www.mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10e.asp

Just like Imperialism and Economic Imperialism, two tenets of Capitalism that you blatantly ignore.

Imperialism is an arena of the State. That the State uses capitalism for its ends does not indict capitalism.

What's next, the Catholic Encyclopedia ? The Germans permitted Lenin into make his way to Russia because they wanted the Russian Empire out of the picture, not because of some non-existent Illuminatis or any kind of conspiracy theories, that I assume you have been indoctrinated to.

As I suspected, you did not read what I offered you perhaps because it would give you a crack in your edifice of thought and taint that holy belief in this ideology. If you bothered to actually take a look, you would come to see the it was Wall Street bankers and money that supported Bolsheviks financially, names such as Armand Hammer, or the banks Kuhn, Loeb, and Co.

That's coming from someone who believes that USA is socialist.

He can believe what he likes, but he certainly is no friend of the free market.

You haven't pointed anything noteworthy until now really. The fact that economists haven't changed in over 100 years irks me. Look at any science: in 100 years, there have been revolutions. In physics, in that time span, there was special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics (not to mention Quantum Field theory and QED).In Chemistry, there was quantum chemistry and huge strides in biochemistry and medical chemistry.In economics, only minor changes (like the addition of "rational expectations" or "Game theory" -- nothing new).Economics is simply an unscientific failure.

I wouldn't expect a Marxist to say anything less. You don't have to like, it really. But that is the way it goes. I cannot change it.

You can not prove your thesis like this. Economics is above all mathematics, which you are apparently ignorant of, not literature.

Modern economists, that includes the Austrian School, are pitifully ignorant of the workings of the economy; it's neoclassical nonsense.

Look up Sraffa's criticism of Neoclassical economics as some extracurricular studies; you may actually learn something, or even Rudolf Hilferding.

Or, if you are too lazy to do that, answer this: how do you measure demand?

"Real" economists simply use the diminishing marginal utility curve, but how do you measure utility? It's something subjective; I've yet to say "I get x units of utility from this" or even hear someone say that.

Why? It's subjective! But that means there is no way of measuring demand, and all of Neoclassical economics becomes inapplicable.

Such is the nature of the dismal science in the hands of dismal failures.

Your comments are mostly counters against neoclassical economists, not Austrians. Austrians need presume little about individuals, only that they have various ends and will use various means to accomplish those ends. Mathematics is helpful only to a degree, otherwise it is limited, like statistics. It cannot predict individuals, and the reasons Austrians deviate from the classical school is because mathematics plots individuals into neat little equations and deterministic models. Economics, and more importantly, human action, does not work that way. Human thought cannot be predicted, that is why such models fail. The only thing we can deal with is human action.

At least there were bread lines.

And that is good how? You're just proving my point for me.

Well thank you for being honest, if only the politicians could be as much honest as you are, Capitalism would be history by now.

Thank God for Capitalism. May it shine long and prosper!