peter..asks a reason/able..question

in response to..""Capitalism
certainly has been..formed in blood and tears..."

he asks
""What blood..and tears for gods sake?""

mate a brief histry
of this last stage..of capitalism

it began in amsterdam...with the dutch/east-india company
and them issuing shares...and paying huge dividends

by traders..capitalised traders..going trading

this evolved into colonisation
slavery..wars..deliberated poisening and murder of whole nations..from south america..to australia...

every war..ever fought..was financed with capital
that gained ursury..on top of it

heck how many diggers alone..died in just
ww1/ww2...in the boar war..korea/vietnam

or died..under forced labour for the japs
or the germans..[two huge capitalist powers]
contoling..still today much of globalist proffiteering

let recall those chinese..dead from british capitalist[opium trading]
or the current deaths..in columbia[drug war]...that are the only new income..sustaining many capitalists bankers

heck mate
your..a clever guy..how many slaves died
going to usa..or dumped..onto capitalist plantation's

how many people..died to mine that spanish silver
where two thirds the world/silver came from

who's mine workers,..are luckey to live 4 years

or the worker dead..from industial poisens..or asbestosis

heck my brother
your not thinking

these are just..off the top of my heard
but what about those killed for big pharma
like those injected..with monkey serum..what got aids

all so these multinationalist globalist capitalists
can sit..on their big plantations..or estates

how about the poor brits
died in the blitz
the irish

or the 25 million japs..what died from phospher and naplam/bombs

dropped on them by capitalists
making huge bucks from armament built for money..[capital]

mate we are living in capitalist hell
and in the real hell..many are still enslaved

thinking all they are..is their job...
or all they are..is in how many billions..they can scam

think of the hungry
that are hungry because
capitalists..*need their wealth

meed to steal..their oil..or diamonds..or their gold
or their water..or power companies

heck my bro
your not thinking

You're..just as brainwashed
as the Marxists/capitalist/party machine men/
bankers...pope...

the capoes..that drove men/woman
children to work..to death

'work makes free'
[werk maght frei]

yea
lol

by killing you

Peter Hume wrote: Yes, david, what you need to realise is that Poirot and Squeers really do think that the hundred million deaths at the hands of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Hitler (National Socialist German Workers Party), Saddam (Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party), and all the rest, are just some kind of strange coincidence.

They think it's nothing to do with the fact that these were all attempts to implement socialism. And the fact they all these attempts failed is also just some strange coincidence.

Dear Peter,

You have mixed disparate things together and called them socialist.

You have included movements that were not socialist and have implicitly assumed that socialism must be murderous.

It is true that Nazi is an abbreviation for National Socialist.

However, that does not make them socialist. The name of East Germany was the German Democratic Republic. The name did not make it democratic.

Hitler was supported by German industrialists who prospered under Nazi rule. The word, socialist, was used to attract workers into the party. There were Nazis who wanted socialism such as the anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic Gregor Strasser. Strasser was assassinated on Hitler's personal order by the Berlin Gestapo on June 30, 1934. There was never any attempt by the Nazis to implement socialism, and those elements in the party who wanted it were assassinated or suppressed.

Socialism eliminates private ownership of the means of production. This concept includes much more than Marxism which is only one form of socialism. Private ownership may be replaced by public, non-governmental ownership. If socialism is implemented in a democratic manner it may be reasonable. Capitalism may be reasonable also. I think it is in the Scandinavian countries.

Authoritarian rule is never reasonable. However, it may be possible that socialism can be implemented without authoritarian rule. If it doesn’t work and the country is democratic other forms can be tried. I agree with Squeers and Poirot that the US model of corporate capitalism is oppressive. I disagree with them in seeing hope in Marxism.

OUG summed up pretty well the "blood and tears" spilled in the wake of capitalist practice, the spirit of which seems to draw out the worst in human nature. In fact, one could be forced to deduce that it is incompatible with harmonious relations between human beings (let alone the disastrous consequences to the environment).

Peter Hume - although you posit that government intervention in the greedy race to the top is not really capitalism, but some "Keynesian - Marxist construct, it is difficult to deny the diabolical antipathies that arise in humans who are tethered to any system that rewards the competitive pursuance of profit over other considerations. Over and over again throughout history it's demonstrated that cold and calculated aggression and savagery comprise the bedrock upon which these systems thrive.

Marx predicted our present paradigm would destroy itself. Here's the latest on the crumbling of the edifice - a "contagion", no less:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-09-25/european-leaders-in-debt-crisis-talks/2941054

david
“...Marxism … is only one form of socialism.”

Yes indeedy. They all have in common the ideal of public, rather than private, ownership of means of production, agreed?

“You have mixed disparate things together and called them socialist. “

That’s one possibility.

The other logical possibility is that you, like Squeers and Poirot, are not making the common connection between disparate problems all flowing from attempts at public ownership of means of production.

I agree it is important that we speak to the substance of the issue, and take care to avoid confusion over mere names.

The quintessential issue is public versus private ownership of the means of production, but by ownership, is signified *control*. (If resources were nominally privately owned, but all details of how it were to be used were dictated by the state, that would, in substance, be a form of socialism, not of capitalism, agreed?)

For example:
“I agree with Squeers and Poirot that the US model of corporate capitalism is oppressive.”

There you have, in common with them, made the error I foreshadowed you would make before you answered, namely “failing to distinguish between outcomes of the private, versus outcomes of the governmental control of the means of production”.

The very large degree of governmental control of money, credit, banking, interest rates, and business in the USA has the logically necessary effect of favouring and cartelizing large businesses, and making them dependent on state-granted privileges or monopolies.

So you have not made the distinction on which your criticism of capitalism depends. It’s a question of substance not names, and as to the substance of things, the question is why it should not be called “the US model of corporate socialism”

“However, it may be possible that socialism can be implemented without authoritarian rule.”

This is the nub of the entire issue, because if socialism is not possible, then that is the end of the question, isn’t it?

It has already been proved why it’s not possible. This would have explaining power, wouldn’t it? It would explain both the free market and the socialist perspectives on attempts to implement socialism, which is, none of them have worked. (Scandinavia, btw, is higher on the Index of Economic Freedom than the USA. In other words, it’s arguably *less* socialist than the USA, not more.)

To understand why it can’t work even in theory, let alone in practice, please amuse an idle hour with reading this: http://mises.org/pdf/econcalc.pdf
“Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” by Ludwig von Mises.

In the absence of private markets for capital goods, economic calculation in terms of money prices becomes impossible. Socialism is not an alternative economic system, it is the abolition of the possibility of rational economising. Abolish private capital, and the only possibility is what actually happened: political totalitarianism, economic chaos, and massive human rights abuses.

That’s why, even in the socialists’ own terms, there was never socialism, but only (unsuccessful) attempts to implement socialism. Now that’s got explaining power, hasn’t it?

(The USSR only lasted as long as it did because it was able to rely on private ownership of capital in numerous ways, without which, it would have collapsed into mass starvation much sooner. BTW this theory also explains the substantial similarity between the ‘international socialism’ of the Russian, and the ‘national socialism’ of the German model. It’s a matter of substance, not names.)

None of the socialists have been able to prove their own claims or refute this argument. Like Marx, they just assume it’s a) possible and b) better, without *thinking through* what it must necessarily entail, and then, when faced with disproofs in theory and practice, they just ignore them. Thus it's not just ignorance, it's culpable ignorance.

What frustrates me about these discussions is that Mises showed in 1921 why attempts to implement socialism could only end in what in fact actually happened. Without being able to refute it, that should have been the end of the entire project. Yet the socialists simply ignored him and went ahead and killed 100 million people. And now they *still* think if we just keep trying it might work eventually!

Now I want you please to consider the possibility that, by persisting in trying to make it work in some form while being unable to refute the argument from economic calculation, you will not share in the guilt of further abuses or enormities. Maybe I’m wrong. Please prove it.

As to the Industrial Revolution, your critique fails because you cannot establish:
a) that the masses would not have been worse off in the absence of privately owned capital, and
b) that state interventions produced *net* benefits, in other words, that they did not produce greater unemployment, poverty and hardship than they relieved.

OUG
You have not distinguished between the outcomes of the private, versus outcomes of the governmental control of the means of production, and therefore your critique of capitalism fails.

The question is not whether evils are financed with capital, since they can be and are financed with capital under public ownership of the means of production. The question is whether the evils are necessarily the outcome of the private ownership of the means of production, rather than of the public. That’s what you haven’t established.

To name wars - carried on by states, under claim of monopoly right, financed by taxation and inflation and government debt, using conscription, against other states, for territorial gain by states – as a proof of the evils of capitalism, is a classic example of the confusion, illogic, and double standard that I named.