Marxists?

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You asked for a CEO who contributed x120 more to society than any worker and Buffett does. The relative to income bit is only if you do not count the income taxes paid by Berkshire Hathaway as a corporation where Buffett is a large owner. You should also attribute a percentage of the income tax paid by every single one of Buffett's employees since he makes their salaries possible.



Please, you're a Marxist/Socialist, a fan of the one ideology that has MURDERED more people in cold blood than every other ideology throughout the history of the world. I love it how you take the ad hominem route though, considering you marxists are supposedly the "moral" ones.

Just as an information blurb about me:

29 years old, paid my way through college by working in factories, currently hold 2 degrees, 1 in computer science and an MBA. I also have a past as a Trotskyist, but I grew out of that in my early 20s, I suggest you do the same.

naa capitalism killed and is killing just like all the socialist ideologies ...capitalism is just better at rationalizing its crimes because capitalism individualizes the social failures on the single individual.



from Trotskyism to neoconservatorism or uber right-wing libertarianism is a very common path

Did Capitalism kill 50 million people, because Stalinist ideology did, and that was directly inspired by Marxism, You would need to add Mao, The Red Khmer (something like 25 - 30% of the population of Chambodia), then there is North Korea where the numbers are somewhat hard to come by considering that has been held as a personal playground of the Marxist inspired Kim Dynasty under the "Juche" variant of Marxism for about 60 years now. Then there is of course, Belarus, Hoxha in Albania and countless other "small time" Marxist variants that only killed a "few" people by Marxist standards so that only counts for 5 - 10 million or so.

One could of course argue, as you do that "capitalism kills" but its not really a state sanctioned policy like under Marxism. Heck, even Marx needed to add slave labor to his economic calculations to make the math work.

You know, Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Now, Marxism has been tried over 10 times to my knowledge, and every single time it has ended with state sanctioned murder, dictatorships, widespread corruption, suffering and planned starvation. So, the logic dictates that anyone who wants to "try" marxism again is insane by Einstein's definition.

50 millions,conservative estimate
at least 100 millions in the 20th century if you use the same metric of The livre noir of capitalism(counting the two world wars)



I'm not a Marxist,and non-Marxist(or non-authoritarian marxist) socialist experiment of any significance in the 20th century — without exception — has either been crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States or by the fascists/stalinists

The only non-capitalist countries who had a chance to survive long enough without "coup d'etè" were all paranoic autoritharian dictatorships

Yeah, but then that book is highly questionable as far as I recall. The world war deaths have to be attributed to national socialism which is hardly capitalist. The Korean war deaths have to be attributed to communism as the conflict was initiated by Communist North Korea. To make the argument a bit shorter, the argument is poorly made.

North Korea and and the Soviet Union were NEVER communist. Do you honestly believe Stalin and Kim Jong wanted to wither away the state?

As I've said on this forum before, part of the reason why Marxism can never be implemented is that it will never get past the "party rule" transition period. However, one cannot argue that they weren't largely communist/marxist.

@ TM: The USSR, China, etc., were not applied marxism. They only used marxist rhetoric. Obviously, if you define communism as the system used in Russia, then yes, the Soviet Union was communist. Still, that sounds quite... circular.

I said earlier that marxist predictions were wrong at least by the end of the 19th century. That is one thing. In this way, as a predictive tool, marxism has failed. The later revolutions became marxist because the Russian Revolution was taken over by marxism-inspired leaders, and because the Russian revolutionary state funded and supported revolutions everywhere, at least if they used orthodox conceptions. In Russia itself, the revolution was hardly the one predicted by Marx. The proletarian revolution was started in a country without a meaningful proletariat -- it spelled failure from the start. What it created was an authoritarian state with planned economy, not at all what Marx argued for.

On the subject of achievements, you will have to go back to the facts. Soviet industry was not based on slave labour. The workforce was under many restrictions, but that is not slavery. Also, during the whole communist period, the Soviet Union knew an impressive growth in all areas, though it slowed down in the 1970s. Yes, that growth is the product of industrialization, but why was there induztrialisation? Because of economic planning. It didn't happen by chance, and without the revolution, it is unlikely it would have happened at all. Czarist Russia was slowly on its way, but the keyword here is "slowly" -- very slowly. In 1910, Russia was a backwards hell. By 1940, it could fight and win a mechanized and industrialized war against the most powerful European country basically on its own. It was still somewhat chaotic, but then, so are all countries in the process of industrialization, as the USSR was -- the first five-year plan was laid down in 1928 only, after all.

I agree that marxism (as an utopic system) has never been successfully implemented. I don't think it has ever been implemented at all. I doubt it will ever be. Few utopias have ever been implemented, in fact, and, AFAIK, all of them failed, for one reason or another. That doesn't mean they are doomed to fail because of internal contradictions, only that attempts at major societal changes rarely succeed.

Why not? How can you prove that communism was their belief? How can simply stating that you are a communist make you a communist?

How do you explain the fact that since the end of the USSR, the average life expectancy in Russia has fallen by 10 years?

No, it hasn't. the 100 million people death toll is highly exaggerated. For example, Stalin, (if we are to put the blame *entirely* on just one man in the former USSR, excluding those whom actually carried out the atrocities) as horrible as he was he actually killed around 4-10 million people. (from gulags, the Great Terror, etc. excluding the 1932-33 famine deaths, controversial as they are)

This hardly approaches the number of people Hitler killed. (And that's not counting the deaths brought on through World War II, which I find rather redundant to mention as a legitimate gauge of how many people he actually killed through the regime itself and the terror that it inflicted)

As for Mao, the famine that occurred in China(which was still yet to be fully industrialized effectively) was not unusual to the Chinese nation or any nation of that sort (Russia comes to mind under the Czar).

Taking away the Chinese famine, Mao also killed way less then if we were to blame Mao for the mass starvation/famine.

Those are just a few examples of my gripes with those greatly exaggerated death tolls. (as documented by the unreliable Black Book Of Communism)



Yes, they did (or tried to do so).

After the October Revolution there were active attempts to apply Marxist/communist policies to backwards Russia, with the hope that successful revolutions in Germany and Italy, etc. would spare revolutionary Russia from a fate of continual backwardness(while trying to build socialism nonetheless)

In China, a similar drive to apply communist policies took hold (land to the tiller, socialization of labor both urban and rural, emancipation of women, etc.)

Explain to me how those weren't active attempts to work with what they had to build socialism, even in it's distorted, bureaucratic form.



And as a result they tried to make do with what the revolution had given them.



First of all, socialism isn't a utopia. (which is what Marx called for as a transitional stage towards communism, or the final stage of human society) Yes, socialism has been implemented as I've mentioned above. It just wasn't implemented in the way Marx intended.

The reason for their failure was not only their bureaucratic degeneration, but also because they tried to co-exist alongside capitalist states(Engels wrote that the revolution must be international in scope, and cannot be limited to a single nation or even a few handful of nations).

The Holodomor in a nutshell

Ukrainian Seperatists: We're leaving the USSR screw you guise.

Stalin: OK then GTFO, and I'm not sending you any more food.

Ukrainian Seperatists: Oh noes *starvation*

Hardly analogous to rounding up 6 million people into ghettos en route to be forced into gas chambers.

Yes, a lot more.

Official WHO figures are that 19 000 children die every day due to malnutrition and other preventable causes.

Causes that are a direct result of the existing economic order.

I'd say that your fairy tale in defense of murdering between 2.5 million and 7.5 million people by Stalin and the USSR is entertaining but hardly historically correct. If we compare Stalin's total death toll on a reasonable median estimate, it comes to about 30 million, or roughly 5 times as many as the Holocaust. Of course, there is an argument that Hitler caused some 66 million deaths total through his actions, but then again, we aren't really discussing National Socialism vs Communism.
However, if we add Mao's number to Stalin's we come to about 70 million people. Which still leaves out North Korea, The Red Khmer and a few other murderous communist states.

To be honest, a better strategy for you would be to argue that none of the above were communist related regimes.

There is substantial evidence to support the idea that rich peasants (kulaks) were resistant to [forced] collectivization. Before collectivization (which I am in no way defending), they owned "24 or more acres, or had employed farm workers."

They were more or less reluctant to give up their land or hired labor to the oppressive Stalinist state.

source(s): Ukrainan Famine

But that in no way justified murdering them, even indirectly as was the case here.

Although capitalism can be partially blamed for such tragedies, it's not entirely to blame. As with socialism, people and other factors must be added into the equation too.

Marx's revolution was supposed to happen by itself and everywhere, not to be "built". He has said very little about rural society. I call what happened a failed prediction.

Land reform isn't a strictly marxist agenda. All revolutions tend to change the policy towards land possession.

In the case of China, Mao developped an entirely original system -- which is a good thing, since there were even less industry workers than in Russia. He just put "class struggle" in it so he could have the little Soviet help he received and because it was en vogue.


That was not supposed to happen. It was meant to work at first. It didn't. I call that a failure.


A system that only works in someone's imagination is a utopia. Marx thought it inevitable. So far, the world socialist revolution doesn't seem forthcoming. When you predict A, and B happens, you failed.

Obviously, socialism in the reformist sense has worked and whatever was the system of the USSR worked too. But Marx doesn't enter into it.

Last edited by enrico_dandolo on 02 Sep 2012, 9:19 am, edited 1 time in total.