Been looking for this for a while. I find it humorous

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"I suppose you thought I was dead? No such thing. Don't flatter yourselves that I haven't got my eye upon you. I am wide awake, and you give plenty to look at."
Household Words, Aug. 24, 1850
From the Raven in the Happy Family

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"I suppose you thought I was dead? No such thing. Don't flatter yourselves that I haven't got my eye upon you. I am wide awake, and you give plenty to look at."
Household Words, Aug. 24, 1850
From the Raven in the Happy Family

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Somehow we're going somewhere.

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"I suppose you thought I was dead? No such thing. Don't flatter yourselves that I haven't got my eye upon you. I am wide awake, and you give plenty to look at."
Household Words, Aug. 24, 1850
From the Raven in the Happy Family

According to what I have, Facism is when you have two cows and you give them milk. The Government doesn't take your cows, it just takes your milk and sells it.

Bureaucracy is the same definition of New Dealism.

Anarchism: Keep the cows. Steal another one. Shoot the Government.

Conservatism: Freeze the Milk. Embalm the cows.

Liberalism: Give away one cow. Now get the government to get you another one. Now give them both away.

However, you'll notice that only in Capitalism do you end up with more than you started with...

Survivalism: Put your cow in a steel-reinforced concrete bunker, and sit outside and wait for someone to take it. Shoot them and take THEIR cow.

New Liberalism: Whine about how your ancestors were denied cows by somebody else's ancestors, until people get tired of you and give you a cow to shut you up.

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Calvin: "No efficiency, no accountability... I tell you, Hobbes, it's a lousy way to run a Universe." -- Bill Watterson

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Death before Dishonor!
However Dishonor has
quite a disputed defintion.

Socialism is the prelude to communism. Step One: Workers stage violent revolution. Then they implement socialism (although Marx had it wrong where socialism would be implemented -- he said already-industrialised countries, while Lenin knew Russia was building to the right formula). This socialism implementation is on the way to achieving communism.

The USSR only ever got to socialism. I'm not sure about Cuba, but I don't you could call them completely communist, by Marx's definition.

Now, I fully expect DT to correct everything I've said.

quote:

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Socialism is the prelude to communism. Step One: Workers stage violent revolution. Then they implement socialism (although Marx had it wrong where socialism would be implemented -- he said already-industrialised countries, while Lenin knew Russia was building to the right formula). This socialism implementation is on the way to achieving communism.

The USSR only ever got to socialism. I'm not sure about Cuba, but I don't you could call them completely communist, by Marx's definition.

Now, I fully expect DT to correct everything I've said.

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Righty-o chap!
Firstly, I'll correct your comment on Marx's error. Marx was not in error. There's a reason the Soviet Union failed. Socialism in one country is impossible (and an inaccuracy). Socialism in a backwards country like Russia was even more impossible, particularly since the modified capitalist forms of Lenin and Trotsky would not have worked for long in Russia. Socialist revolutions were far more likely to succeed in the long-term in industrial nations. Allow me to reference one of Vladimir Lenin's messages to Leon Trotsky during the Brest-Litovsk Negotiations.

quote:

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If it were necessary for us to go under to assure the success of the German revolution, we should have to do it. The German revolution is vastly more important than ours.

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Now, you were correct in regards to the stages of the dialectic. Socialism is the state between capitalism (mature capitalism) and communism.

Cuba was not a socialist government. In fact, there has never been one. There has been a worker's state, the Soviet Union. But it was the only one. No other revolution was fully carried through. The suppression of the revolutions in Poland, Germany, and Hungary during the post-WWII era by the Stalinist beauracracy are examples of this, as was the failed 1923 revolution in Germany and the failed revolution in China. The "revolutions" in China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, etc were all the product of protracted guerilla wars carried out mainly by the peasantry. The regimes installed in Eastern Europe after WWII were the exact opposite. Mao would later call it social-imperialism (interesting to note that when his buddy Stalin was doing it, Mao had no problem with it).

It is interesting to note that the Stalinist beuracracy, what most refer to as communism and what Marxists refer to as Stalinism, was the result of the failure of the Bolsheviks to internationalize the revolution. Of course, historically, true revolutions are opposed by the majority of the imperialist world, note the French Revolution, so this was not surprising. Primarily, the defeat of the German Revolution was responsible for this. As to whether or not the Red Army should've (and could've) intervened is a matter of debate for higher circles than this. The final death blow, of course, came at the hands of Josef Stalin, whose purges of the late 1930s eliminated the Left Opposition, but perhaps more importantly, his alliance with the Kouamintang was criminal.

So there you have it, my weekly primer on the differences between socialism and communism :-)

If anyone is interested in discussing this further, feel free to contact me via ICQ or email (not that I won't post here, but I prefer to do things one on one). A lot of the problems with Marxism is that we have had some bad press agents :-)

If we could achieve such universal selflessness without killing all the selfish b*stards, I'd be all for communism. In fact, if such selflessness could be achieved, we'd have it already. As things stand now, I believe that the best we can hope for is to each do what's right to the best of our knowledge. Any plan for world peace that involves killing all the people who disagree with you (even if it is "inevitable" -- a phrase that sounds like "It's not my fault!" to me) doesn't sound like "universal brotherhood" to me.

--Baloo

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"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
--Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Come Hither and Yawn...

Hai-keeba!