Why Are So Many Young People Becoming Socialists? - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15164620
B0ycey wrote:Does private property create innovation? How is it the Soviets won the Space race I wonder?


The soviets and other commies won a lot of medals in Olympic games too. The put the first man in space and after that they got their butt kicked. IN any event I do not deny that Russians are a smart bunch, but there is only so much you can do in a socialist nation. By the way North Korea has great rockets and weapons. Would you like to live there? Your love for socialism is evident, don't try so hard. BTW, if I was in the gutter I would also be a socialist.

Besides, what people call Socialists (especially in America) are the people who are asking for reform in social programs and a fair tax program. You know, Social Democrats. It is telling to me that you basically call @Unthinking Majority a smart person and even gave him a high five


What you call socialism is capitalism sponsoring social programs. How many times to I have to tell you that? I don't have issues with what the Nordic nations do.


Stalin was a Fascists in Socialism clothing. Hardcore revolutionary Socialists aren't even making headway in the Western political theatre so I don't even know why you think they are dangerous considering they are bedroom dwellers. You come on to PoFo and think that is Socialism because we have A FEW of them reside on here. So the mere fact you agreed with @Unthinking Majority has proven to me that I was right last week on everything I was telling you and you need to take a hard look into who is actually behind Sanders and stop witchunting them. They are the very people you have JUST called smart. And you know what, you call them Capitalists as well. Win win right? And perhaps that is why so many young people are becoming Socialists. They are smart. They realise the system is currently against them and they have moved Socialism away from the Cold War mentality and bring it forward in line with fairness.


Unthinking majority makes logical statements whereas you confuse socialism with the Nordic model which is based on capitalism.
#15164621
Tainari88 wrote:
I would say a van more likely.



It's how I get from bedroom to bedroom. (grin)


Tainari88 wrote:
Big smile.

I am glad you are around to always be a great debater Ckaithatsu.

I need to answer a PM from a potential visitor.... ;)



Break a leg.

I'll be getting back to my bonobo porn....

*Someone's* gotta do the debatin' around here....

Later!
#15164624
ckaihatsu wrote:-- Dwelling in a bedroom near you --


x D

Why do the bedroom socialists always say "that was not real socialism" when confronted with the failures of many socialist nations that had famine and extreme poverty?

Somehow these guys believe that this time around they will do socialism correctly because all the forms of wealth creation will be in the hands of all the workers in the world. Guys, that would be like herding cats in a horse with your rope. That is just a feel goo statement that has no base on reality. All enterprises need management and creativity at the top.

I do propose a solution: No one is stopping all socialists in the planet to network, pool their resources together, and start a business that is owned equally by all. Why not do that?
#15164627
Julian658 wrote:The soviets and other commies won a lot of medals in Olympic games too. The put the first man in space and after that they got their butt kicked. IN any event I do not deny that Russians are a smart bunch, but there is only so much you can do in a socialist nation. By the way North Korea has great rockets and weapons. Would you like to live there? Your love for socialism is evident, don't try so hard. BTW, if I was in the gutter I would also be a socialist.


We were talking about innovation and you respond to me by saying your usual waffle which doesn't mention innovation at all. What has the Olympics got to do with anything either of us said? The mere fact that the Soviets won the space race means that Socialism clearly doesn't deter innovation. And need I remind you that it wasn't Capitalism or the private sector that got Armstrong or Aldrin to the moon but American tax dollars and a state run program. In other words a social run program.

What you call socialism is capitalism sponsoring social programs. How many times to I have to tell you that? I don't have issues with what the Nordic nations do.


But that is the problem with you. The people who call for this, fight for this, support Sanders, start movements and lobby for change are actually asking for this and you say you don't have a problem with what they are fighting for. But then you will say these guys are bad evil left wingers in your next breath when ever anything comes up on this forum that has to do with tax reform, Social healthcare, welfare or social justice. Basically people who want to change the system. And you actually have called them smart anyway and that will keep on being brought up now. So as that is the case, it is perhaps about time you changed your affiliation wouldn't you agree?

Unthinking majority makes logical statements whereas you confuse socialism with the Nordic model which is based on capitalism.


I don't confuse it with anything. I have told you I was a Social Democrat like at least ten times now. And you then call me a Socialist and then say things like "you guys and your movement" blah blah blah. I even asked you for a definition and you changed the source so you could link it to Marx from an established source. When you struggle to even know what Socialism is you start to repeat the Cold War rhetoric we used to hear back in the 80s. I don't claim that the Nordic model is pure Socialism. It is a hybrid economy. But Right-Wingers keep calling Social Democrats Socialist so how am I to debate that when they are wrong? All YOU NEED TO KNOW is that young people are Social Democrats not pure Socialists and as such YOU should support their movement as you said in such words that they are SMART!
#15164628
Julian658 wrote:
Why do the bedroom socialists always say "that was not real socialism" when confronted with the failures of many socialist nations that had famine and extreme poverty?

Somehow these guys believe that this time around they will do socialism correctly because all the forms of wealth creation will be in the hands of all the workers in the world. Guys, that would be like herding cats in a horse with your rope. That is just a feel goo statement that has no base on reality. All enterprises need management and creativity at the top.

I do propose a solution: No one is stopping all socialists in the planet to network, pool their resources together, and start a business that is owned equally by all. Why not do that?



Julian, I gotta hand it to you -- you're *way* funnier than me, without even *trying*.

If you haven't noticed, no one around here is doing any flag-waving. On the far left we don't point to Eastern Bloc countries from the 20th century to say 'That's how it needs to be.'

(Okay, there's one Titoist around here, from recollection, but that's about it.)

The reason those countries are not shining examples for us is because they had to use most of their energies in simply being *anti-imperialist*, resisting the Western onslaught. For the Bolsheviks, it was this:


Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_War


To clarify, the measurement of social 'success' does *not* have be in terms of *wealth* -- that's a capitalist social construction, when really the satisfaction of human needs and wants is what counts, and that can be done by the workers themselves, controlling production directly, for the common good. No wealth or capitalist exchange values of any kind needed.

Your pessimism regarding proletarian cooperative efforts that displace capitalist private property relations is misplaced -- I happen to call for simply *internalizing* worker-only circulating currency for individual-discretionary economic activity among all *collectivized* workplaces and their production. Here's an introduction:


global syndicalist currency

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=174857
#15164630
ckaihatsu wrote:

I happen to call for simply *internalizing* worker-only circulating currency for individual-discretionary economic activity among all *collectivized* workplaces and their production.



Would that be a non-convertible currency?

And before you start, don't add another link I won't use to that one. You manage to be both vague and verbose, and there are limits..
#15164632
ckaihatsu wrote:Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_War


I do not think you will find a civil war in Europe or America on which foreign powers have not actively intervened.

Your argument that Socialism failed because of foreign interference is just one more nail on the coffin of Socialism.

If socialism cannot develop in actual reality but requires a vacuum to shield it from foreign pressure then it's worthless by definition because such a thing does not exist.

Socialism failed because it is utterly corrupt, inefficient, undemocratic and a total failure in practice.

You have the bad habit of blaming foreigners for anything & everything and it's boring and witless.

It's also anachronistic spam.

B0ycey wrote:We were talking about innovation and you respond to me by saying your usual waffle which doesn't mention innovation at all. What has the Olympics got to do with anything either of us said? The mere fact that the Soviets won the space race means that Socialism clearly doesn't deter innovation. And need I remind you that it wasn't Capitalism or the private sector that got Armstrong or Aldrin to the moon but American tax dollars and a state run program. In other words a social run program.


He's right and you 're wrong. Landing a man on the moon does not prove that "Socialism" likes innovation. As Julian658 correctly explained, the moon landing like the Olympic fiascos was about the prestige of the Soviet dictatorship, it did not happen as a result of communism but out of enormous psychological complexes to compete with the Democratic West. That competition proved fruitless for the Soviet system that collapsed under its own weight.

Also, the fact that this right winger is coming around to centrist social democracy should make you happy instead of clearly driving you up the wall.
#15164634
noemon wrote:
I do not think you will find a civil war in Europe or America on which foreign powers have not actively intervened.

Your argument that Socialism failed because of foreign interference is just one more nail on the coffin of Socialism.

If socialism cannot develop in actual reality but requires a vacuum to shield it from foreign pressure then it's worthless by definition because such a thing does not exist.

Socialism failed because it is utterly corrupt, inefficient, undemocratic and a total failure in practice.

You have the bad habit of blaming foreigners for anything & everything and it's boring and witless.

It's also anachronistic spam.



Okay, with this line I invite you to identify exactly when "socialism failed", before the Western intervention of 1918.

Obviously you're just being *biased*, since you seem to think that any workers-control has to be initiated in a trial-by-fire, by the Western powers-that-be -- a militaristic 'stress test', as it were.
#15164635
noemon wrote:He's right and you 're wrong. Landing a man on the moon does not prove that "Socialism" likes innovation. As Julian658 correctly explained, the moon landing like the Olympic fiascos was about the prestige of the Soviet dictatorship, it did not happen as a result of communism but out of enormous psychological complexes to compete with the Democratic West.


The Soviets have never landed a man on the moon nor were they Communist. They also won all the firsts that mattered. But all I said was Socialism doesn't deter innovation and clearly it doesn't as Lenin and Stalin took Russia from a shithole to a superpower in a few Decades so he is wrong and I am right. The only thing you need to innovate is the means, education and desire to do so. If Capital was needed at all, we would have never got out of the hunter gatherer age.
#15164638
ckaihatsu wrote:Okay, with this line I invite you to identify exactly when "socialism failed", before the Western intervention of 1918.


Is there any socialist country(succesfull or otherwise) before the Russian revolution?

If there is and you want to use it as an example for the success of "Socialism" then bring it forward.

Obviously you're just being *biased*, since you seem to think that any workers-control has to be initiated in a trial-by-fire, by the Western powers-that-be -- a militaristic 'stress test', as it were.


So you concede that socialism has to be created in perfect laboratory conditions to give it a chance for life and that it cannot survive in the real world.

Trial by fire is how every single nation-state and system except for the fake ones have come into existence. If a system cannot survive real world conditions then it is not a system worth anything.

B0ycey wrote:The Soviets have never landed a man on the moon nor were they Communist. They also won all the firsts that mattered. But all I said was Socialism doesn't deter innovation and clearly it doesn't as Lenin and Stalin took Russia from a shithole to a superpower in a few Decades so he is wrong and I am right. The only thing you need to innovate is the means, education and desire to do so. If Capital was needed at all, we would have never got out of the hunter gatherer age.


They did not win anything that mattered, they were a corrupt and undemocratic bunch that only undertook prestige projects to sustain their own penis complexes and they collapsed in the most undignified manner possible precisely because their system lacked innovation. It's not like we do not have hindsight. We do. The Soviet system does not compare in terms of innovation with the western systems who smoked out it of existence. Russia was a superpower long before Lenin and Stalin.

We are not talking about hypotheticals here. We know for a fact that the Soviets collapsed under their own weight which makes you factually wrong and with no possible way out of the error.
#15164640
wat0n wrote:Weird, and I thought the capitalist West was the one that managed to won the most important first of the Cold War: Getting nuclear weapons.


The Soviets won the space race, not the nuclear race, although like the Americans they caught up. Besides, the nuclear race was won by a social state run program called the Manhattan Project and not capitalism run enterprise.
#15164642
B0ycey wrote:The Soviets won the space race, not the nuclear race, although like the Americans they caught up. Besides, the nuclear race was won by a social state run program called the Manhattan Project and not capitalism run enterprise.


...A program that would only be funded owing to the tax-paying capitalist enterprises.

In fact, a similar thing can be noted with arms production during WWII. The US at some point produced more arms than everyone else combined, and even gave arms to the Soviets towards the end of the war.

:)
#15164643
noemon wrote:Is there any socialist country(succesfull or otherwise) before the Russian revolution?

No.

noemon wrote:If there is and you want to use it as an example for the success of "Socialism" then bring it forward

Pass. (Your political table manners are exemplary.)

noemon wrote:So you concede that socialism has to be created in perfect laboratory conditions to give it a chance for life and that it cannot survive in the real world.
Trial by fire is how every single nation-state and system except for the fake ones have come into existence. If a system cannot survive real world conditions then it is not a system worth anything.


Oh, okay, so you see Western militarist imperialism as simply being a global king-of-the-hill dynamic. Got it. Might-makes-right, then, and all nations should immediately get nukes before they're nuked first. I can see now why Eastern bloc / Stalinist countries -- and now Iran, these days -- did what they did in light of this prevailing warmongering attitude.
#15164644
noemon wrote:We are not talking about hypotheticals here. We know for a fact that the Soviets collapsed under their own weight which makes you factually wrong and with no possible way out of the error.


Before Lenin, Russia was not a Superpower. It was a frozen wasteland.

As for the reasons it collapsed, the invisible hand does indeed create market forces that under pure Socialism would need to be artificially manipulated. Gorbachev tried to introduced Perestroika but it was too late. It didn't need to fail. It failed because the SU were focused on national interests rather than social interests and then Soviet States broke away because people could see what the West had compared to them. Had they focused on the interests of the people rather than the state it may well have worked. But even if we accept that, that still doesn't explain why you think innovation didn't occur in the SU which was the original claim I questioned.
#15164646
wat0n wrote:...A program that would only be funded owing to the tax-paying capitalist enterprises.


But the Soviets had a similar program from a different economic model? And the point I was making is without the state running the program, the program wouldn't have existed in America. Basically the building blocks of Socialism being embraced let America catch up.
#15164647
B0ycey wrote:But the Soviets had a similar program from a different economic model? And the point I was making is without the state running the program, the program wouldn't have existed in America. Basically the building blocks of Socialism being embraced let America catch up.


The Soviets had a similar program, but it came to success later and partly owing to espionage.

You could say that lacking the building blocks of capitalism is exactly what led to the Soviet collapse. In particular, they were unable to solve the agency problem involved in having a centralized production of the goods and services the population prefers and needs, and there was also a problem with central planning itself because it turns out the problem was literally impossible to solve in any useful timeframe (and still is, there is still not enough computing power to do so, let alone before 1991)
#15164648
wat0n wrote:The Soviets had a similar program, but it came to success later and partly owing to espionage.

You could say that lacking the building blocks of capitalism is exactly what led to the Soviet collapse. In particular, they were unable to solve the agency problem involved in having a centralized production of the goods and services the population prefers and needs, and there was also a problem with central planning itself because it turns out the problem was literally impossible to solve in any useful timeframe (and still is, there is still not enough computing power to do so, let alone before 1991)


The point is the Soviets had a successful Space program so they had innovation. Yes it failed as a state, but I never said it successed as a state. It is what is known as a strawman.

Besides, SU was an authoritarian state. Pure Socialism could only work as a democracy as the people would need to regularly set the state agenda preventing it from failing.
#15164649
ckaihatsu wrote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_War


To clarify, the measurement of social 'success' does *not* have be in terms of *wealth* -- that's a capitalist social construction, when really the satisfaction of human needs and wants is what counts, and that can be done by the workers themselves, controlling production directly, for the common good. No wealth or capitalist exchange values of any kind needed.


That is an utopia that can only be realized when capitalism has crated redundant wealth. That does not happen by singing John Lennon's Imagine.
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