@Setanta,
Setanta wrote:
You appear to me to be completely delusional. Have you considered professional counseling?
First, you shouldn't do this in discussions. It is terribly aggressive and provocative.
Quote:You have no more idea what socialism means than you do what fascism means.
If you're going to make these bold assertions that I have no idea what I'm talking about, you have to explain what was wrong with my descriptions, from your perspective. Otherwise you're just blowing up what I said and replacing it with what you have to say.
Quote:You obviously also don't know a damned thing about history. The Soviet Union was, allegedly, socialist long before the second world war. Lenin only modified the Marxist version of socialism when the New Economic Policy was adopted in 1921, and he freely admitted that it was a "retreat" from Marxism.
I don't know this exactly, but I do know that Marx disliked socialism and saw it as an obstacle to achieving communism. Really, they are very different because socialism preserves capitalism and redistributes money as a means of controlling society. Communism is ultimately about everyone working for the common good and doesn't require any money because people only take what they need to sustain themselves. Communism is a lovely idea, in theory, but it requires everyone be on their absolute best behavior, otherwise there are no budgets limiting how much people can take from the common supply of resources.
Quote:The Soviet state was a communist state, in the Marxist sense of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was precisely why Lenin promulgated the NEP--to have the dictatorship of the proletariat, you need an industrial state with an industrial proletariat.
Marx saw communism as something that would occur voluntarily once people grasped the spirit of it, but the authoritarianism was deemed a necessary bridge before arriving at the voluntary version. Either way, the point was that liberty was never explicitly promoted as part of communism, though it certainly could have been. In fact, you could argue that Adam Smith foresaw capitalism evolving into communism by means of diligent saving and the self-discipline that comes with that and the work ethic.
Quote:Had Lenin not been shot by Fanya Kaplan in 1918, he might have had the energy to impose his policies effectively. As it was, he was fortunate to have survived his wounds. Regardless of whether one considers the NEP to have been an effective policy, it is total bullsh*t to compare the Marxist-Leninist state to modern socialist states.
Socialism is just collectivist authoritarianism. The idea is to revoke any respect of individual liberty in favor of either centralized or decentralized subjugation of individuals to collective authority in some form or other.
Quote:Your comments about the NSDAP (the German acronym for the National Socialist German Workers' Party) are even crazier, although not surprising. Since at least the election of Mr. Obama, conservative nutbags have been attempting to forward the idiotic narrative that the Nazis were left-wing.
Nazism was socialist/fascist. Right and left refer to being for or against the status quo. If you deem the Weimar republic the status quo of the time, then you would call the Nazis left wing, but since the Weimar republic was regarded as a progressive, leftist regime, the Nazis are regarded as right wing.
From another perspective, the capitalists/bourgeoisie of that time were the winners of WWI and the war debt and repayment terms in the treaty of Versailles put the German losers in economic subjugation to the winners, France and Germany. So Nazis could have easily viewed themselves as a proletarian rebellion against the capitalists to the west, but of course they framed their crusade as a war against Bolshevism and 'the Jews,' so they were against soviet communism and thus would appear as right wing in the sense of soviet communism being leftist.
Quote:That's how Hitler came to power, and it was a right-wing takeover. Hitler's first move after the Riechstag fire was to outlaw left-wing parties. His first move after the passage of the Enabling Act was to outlaw all political parties, other than the NSDAP.
You don't know a goddamned thing about socialism, fascism, Nazism, or, it appears, any reliable history at all.
Have you ever read Michel Foucault? He did a really good job of deconstructing the differences between institutions like the military, prisons, hospitals, etc. by treating them all as instruments of authoritarian power and control over populations.
Hitler's nazis were disgruntled WWI soldiers. In a sense they were just veterans who took control over the government/state to set up a nationwide welfare state.
Welfare state socialism is always authoritarian and fascist. It may pretend to be kind and gentle, but the reality is that people have to work to provide welfare for everyone who is entitled to benefits, so there has to be mechanisms, taxation and other requirements for labor force participation. If people opt out, who is going to provide for the national welfare?
That's why all forms of socialism are essentially the same. I won't say that there is no situation where I wouldn't support some form of socialism, i.e. if it was necessary to prevent people from starving/dying, for example. But that's not how it's used in the US.
In the US, socialism aims to pay the high wages and lucrative contracts that are expected by fully-capitalist people and businesses. So unlike other systems of socialized healthcare, there was no part of Obamacare that disciplined doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, etc. to lower their prices and costs. No, there was only a mandate that everyone must buy into for-profit health insurance, and as a result providers started jacking up prices with $$$ in their eyes because of the now government-mandated revenue stream coming into the insurance sector, which in term stimulated all the bourgeois investors from around the globe to milk even more money out of the US 'social healthcare,' in order to fund their own national socialized healthcare systems, which were/are much cheaper because they control what their people and businesses can milk out of the system.
But ultimately a US universal health care system shouldn't have to be mandatory/socialist at all. The US has this ideal called liberty where individuals devote their freedom to living responsibly. That means that people SHOULD be able to cooperate voluntarily to provide the best healthcare to everyone who needs it and that no one should exploit health care industry for exploitative levels of money. Well, guess how far the US people and businesses and ESPECIALLY all the global investors who only care about the US as a market to milk money, care about liberty and voluntary social-ethical responsibility? Not much, if at all, so what we are really supposed to be doing is undermining all that socialist obstruction that prevents the free market from simply providing anyone who wants it the opportunity to learn and practice medicine, produce pharmaceuticals, etc. without submitting to corporate-control mechanisms that prevent price competition and thus make health care unaffordable.
