Passy “The idea that Lenin or Marx led to Stalin is wrong”

Except, that is what actually happened.

“If capitalism is so fantastic, why are 3 billion people malnourished and 1 bn starving when the world produces enough food to feed everyone.”

I would note, capitalism is not universally pursued and most of those who starve are in countries which remain the model of their old communist sponsors. Zimbabwe springs to mind, a country run by a minority white government which endure 15 years of sanction s and every body was fed.

“Universal suffrage” was forced upon Rhodesia and Mugabe came to power. Mugabe has overseen the dissipation of the wealth he inherited and produced famine and starvation, using, like his mentors, Lenin and Stalin as a tool for political compliance.

The obvious response is… if socialism/communism was so wonderful an alternative:

Why did Lenin and stalin both resport to starving their own people?
What did Pol Pot achieve apart form mass murder in the name of Cambodian socialism?
How many millions were deliberately starved to death in China under Mao and in North Korea since socialist/communism took over.

If socialism was a “workers nirvana”, why was it necessary for the East Germans to build the wall which ensured their citizens could not freely emigrate?

What happened to Hungary in 1956?

What happened to Czechoslovakia in 1969?

Passy, for all your finger poking and accusations, the model of socialism, which you seek to promote, produced not what you promise but a political abomination which has been largely abandoned by those given a choice.

Having a choice is what life is really about, choosing where to live, what to be, how to care for ones family, who to elect and what to say.

What you promote, whilst appealing to the notion of “universal equality”, is a lie and produces only the horror of repression in its most evil form.

The real reason 3 billion people are malnourished, 1 bn starving is because they put faith in lying politicians who promise ‘equality in a socialist nirvana’, instead of honest truths of capitalism.

*why are 3 billion people malnourished and 1 bn starving when the world produces enough food to feed everyone.*

Hang on Passy, you are getting your ideologies all confused here.
You can't blame capitalism on people having 11 kids that they can't
feed, as the Vatican/Govts ban family planning in their countries.
You can't blame capitalism if more people in the third world don't
grow more food. They have soil, they have rain, they have labour.
What they generally lack is land tenure and microcredit. What
many also lack is markets, due to the fact that they have been
corrupted by EU/US dumping of agricultural products. Last time
I checked, the US/EU were throwing something like 300 billion $ at
agriculture, hardly freemarket economics, more like political
pork barrelling. In fact there would hardly be a global industry,
more distorted by politics, then agriculture.

*Wall St is an example of the market playing out its logic.*

No, Wall St is an example of democracy not working as we would
like it to. Dummies were voted into office, who allowed crooks
to operate freely. Now the American people have a price to pay
for their bad judgement. Americans can only blame themselves, they
voted for these guys not just once, but twice.

*if our unions let the bosses get away with job cuts and wage cuts.*

I remind you that the bosses are nothing but chief workers, who have
their snouts in trough a little closer then the others. The owners
of most big companies, certainly in Australia, are in fact other
workers with super fund investments.

*So even if the RBA cuts rates, the benefits will not be passed on to consumers becuase the banks will say their cost of finance has gone up on the market.*

Given that there is no incentive to save in Australia, we borrow half
our funds from overseas lenders. If banks have to pay more for those
funds, why should they not pass on those rising costs?

Give people an incentive to save, which our tax system does not,
then money for housing would-be-cheaper.

Passy,

Firstly, it was really nice to see you come out fighting in your last comment to me. I'm glad to see you willing to get out and fight for what you believe in.

A couple of points:

1) I notice that you didn't respond to the question in my last comment - what exactly do you think banks do? You're ramblings about worker excess don't really give me an idea of your thoughts on it.

2) "One the question of a possible recession in Australia, what do people make of the $4 bn bailout by Swan of non-bank lenders here, to stimulate competition? Is this a sign of confidence or fear or something else?"

In my eyes, it's more tokenism from the ALP. They got in for the wrong reasons and they're demonstrating that they're more about symbol than substance. My two complaints are that we can't get rid of them fast enough, and also that there isn't really a suitable alternative.

3) "If capitalism is so fantastic, why are 3 billion people malnourished and 1 bn starving when the world produces enough food to feed everyone. ... "voting with their wallets"."

See, this is the crux of where you're barking up the wrong tree. We humans don't have a great history of long term cooperation, and have an even worse record of seeing eye to eye. Your position really requires the very vast majority of people on the planet to agree to adopt socialism in some form (and the things that go with that - coming below) and to keep going with it. Which, frankly, is unachievable.

One of the reasons why we will never have a majority of the people going for socialism is that man is inherently a greedy character. Greed has existed in civilisations since before the Greeks and Romans, ancient Chinese and Japanese, and even in the tribal African areas, and that's not because of Capitalism, but because it's man being man.

T.B.C.

Ideas like that remind me of a scene from a sci-fi movie where one character from the past asks a 'future' person how much it cost to build their ship, with the response being that in his time, man had moved past the concept of money. Given that that was 400 years in the future, perhaps that's an achievable timeframe, but nothing short of that is realistic. And all the trade union militancy will change that.

Anyway, the point is that Capitalism isn't the solution to world hunger, but neither is socialism because it's inherently unachievable on a wide scale.

4) "Give people an incentive to save, which our tax system does not,
then money for housing would-be-cheaper."

Here is a really important point - people need to be held responsible for themselves and need to be given the tools and environment to do that. I'll grant that with the growing tax churn (and 'our' love of it) that the environment isn't very conducive to people helping themselves, and Australians are generally bad at saving anyway, however Socialism is a very bad idea if we want people to take some responsibility for themselves. Especially given that if people aren't willing to look after themselves, how can they be expected to look after others (as socialism would require)?

You have to face it Passy - you're in a minority with a stance that needs to be adopted by the majority before it could seriously be considered, and which goes against thousands of years of history and which can be argued is part of our makeup. It's not going to happen.

The recent failures about things like free trade, the 'bailout', carbon emissions and other things show that we are not a species which could universally adopt something like Socialism. I think you need to recognise that if you beat your head against a brick wall then you're not going to win - as they say "your head will cave in before the wall will"

BN Yabby and Col Rouge

Marx wrote about the self-emancipation of the working class.

Eastern Europe - no self emancipation there, rather Soviet troops. So no socialism.

China, - no working class involved as working class in the revolution; rather a group of de-classed peasants in the Red Army. So no socialism there.

Vietnam ditto.

Cuba - no working class as working class invvolved there. (Castro only declared himself a Marxist Leninist two years after the 1959 revolution. That was to gain Russian support after the US blockaded Cuba.

Cambodia - no working class as working class there so no socialism. In fact Col, it was the US, not lefties like me, who supported Pol Pot.

Russia in 1917 was a workers' revolution. 4 million workers dragged along 100 million peasants. But civil war, 14 invading countries, (including Australia) and the failure of the revolution to spread to Germany - without a revolution in Germany, Lenin said, we are defeated - saw the working class destroyed and the Bolsheviks substitute themselves for the class. Stalin arose from this defeat of the revolution.

Just because a group calls itself socialist doesn't make it so. The ALP used to have (or still has) a socialisation clause in its Constitution. Clearly the ALP is no more socialist than the Liberals.

Similarly with the various communist parties - essentially they were middle class or de-classed peasant movements using the name communist to show they were the real nationalists prepared to take armed insurrection to get their goal of a national unified state. In fact, becuase they used the Stalinist model of crude accumulation to compete with the West (and in the case of China, with the USSR too), they established state capitalism. That was their historic role, not establishing socialism but capitalism.

Over time state capitalism becomes a drag on the productive forces and this produced the conditions for successful political revolutions; but not economic ones because it is merely a sideways step from state capitalism to "market" capitalism.

TBC

Part 2

I supported the workers against the monolith in 1953, 1956, 1970, 1980-81 and then with the successful revolutions of 1989 to 1991. I supported Chinese workers in 1989, the dress rehearsal for the future when they sweep away the butchers of Beijing.

The overthrow of these East Euroepan adn Russian Stalinist abominations was a step forward for humanity and for socialism.

So I counterpose not Stalinism to capitalism but socialism (the self emancipation of the working class through own democratic state of worekrs councils with the right of instant recall and organising society to satisfy human need) to capitalism. Only then can we be freed from the constraints of the profit motive and all that goes with it - deep economic crises, wars, global warming, starvation.

As to starvation, my point is simple. We produce enough to adequately feed the world. Why don't we? becuase it is not profitable to do so. # bn are malnourished because the market means they don;'t have any money, ie they are people who can't vote with their wallets.

Anyway, I am running out of space and this is my second post.

The Wall St financial crisis may well spread to China, given the interrelationship of US and Chines capital and the fact the US is a major market for Chinese exports. That will impact on us. Rising interest rates will dampen business and consumer activity leading to higher unemployment and attempts to cut wages. The US may simply export inflation.

May we be cursed to live in interesting times.

As Rosa Luxemburg wrote many years ago, the choice for humanity is socialism (of the liberationist, democratic and human needs satisfying variety) or barbarism.