Capitalism vs. Communism

[Mazbomb]

So, you admit that Communism wouldn't solve that problem, either?


I know several self-made millionaires and NONE of them was handed a silver spoon. They worked their asses off.
My grandfather came to the US from Italy at the age of 14 to work in the PA coal mines. Instead of eating lunch or playing carRAB during their lunch break, he watched and helped the maintenamce men repairing mining equipment. He showed such initiative that they made him an apprentice. He worked hard, saved his money and started a business on the side by buying the first truck in his town and using it to haul coal. He soon quit the mines and did it full time. From there, he expanded into using the trucks to deliver cases of beer to bars. Eighty years after coming over as a poor teenager with little more than the clothes on his back, he died. While he didn't die rich, he died comfortable enough to leave his three kiRAB almost $1Million, a nice ouse and a business. Not too shabby for a poor immigrant with a fifth grade education.

I can tell you from experience. I wasn't given a six figure salary for my looks. I had to move 600 miles from my nearest relatives with a wife and two small kiRAB and work hard for 20 years to get in a position to be able to demand that kind of money.
And another relative's story is way more remarkabe. He took several overseas assignments, dragging his wife and small kiRAB to Europe after turning around several major sales accounts and is now the #10 man in a Fortune 100 company at the age of 43.
So, you see, I don't buy the line that hard work isn't what leaRAB to opportunity.

[Lithium09xox]

Your stories are from ancient history, when a man could drop out of highschool(or have even less), and still get a good job. The economy has changed since then. A young person entering the workforce today, neeRAB an increasingly expensive post-secondary education to get a decent job.

Your family's experiences also go back to a time when a family could do well on one salary, but today neeRAB the salary of two adults to be at that same level.

I'm sure your grandfather being well off, helped your family, and gave your family opportunities others did not have.

[<3cute, young and wild!<3]

Not true. Major drug companies, for example, spend a large portion of their earnings on drug R&D, the bulk of which is long-term. Auto companies spend billions per year on R&D and building new plants that will last only 10 years or so before being rebuilt. You can't make blanket statements like that. Many companies were given monopolies by the government in order for them to invest huge amounts of their own capital on long-term projects like telephone lines, electric power griRAB, etc., As for the railroaRAB, private entrapreneurs made large fortunes building those railroaRAB for Uncle Sam. I don't think that Uncle Sam laid any track himself.

[Asif Khan]

Communism cannot work well. Society is made up of individuals and individuals are best served by serving themsleves.
It was not by mere chance of "poor" leaders, in all of previous attempts at communism that it has failed, the system was doomed to fail.

Captalism thrives on the rights and achievements of individuals. You, I, He/She are important. It gives the birth right to all people to choose how they wish to live.
Captalism allows you to work and propser under your own achievements and thus control your own life.

Communism does not thrive under any circumstances. It does not cherish rights of the individual. The individual is not important and thus there is no system of individual freedom and civil liberties.
You must work for the betterment of nameless others and your individual success is not important. The individual is controlled by a mindless entity called "we".

[[email protected]]

Someone else wrote this on another site. The link to the whole article is provided at the bottom of my post. It explains quite well, I believe, how Darwin's evoloutionary theories of survival of the fittest, do not apply to humans anymore. We don't have to adapt to changing environments by slow biological evolution like animals. Humans technologically evolve. We are unique among animals in that we can adapt using tools we make with our own hanRAB.....

Turning to humans, Kropotkin pointed out that neither did early human societies conform to the picture painted by the Social Darwinists. Early humans were not isolated individual(ist)s waging a struggle to the death against each other. On the contrary, as surviving primitive societies testified, they lived in societies (tribes and clans) the members of which co-operated with each other to survive:

The very persistence of the clan organization shows how utterly false it is to represent primitive mankind as a disorderly agglomeration of individuals, who only obey their individual passions, and take advantage of their personal force and cunningness against all other representatives of the species (Mutual Aid, Penguin, 1939, p. 82).

To Huxley's claim that "the first men who substituted mutual peace for mutual war-whatever the motive that impelled them to take that step-created society", Kropotkin replied pertinently: "society has not been created by man; it is anterior to man".

Pannekoek attacked on another front. He pointed out that it was not an accident that defenders of capitalist rule jumped at the idea that nature was a struggle for survival amongst ruthless individualists; this was a reflection of capitalist society and of the competition that went on amongst capitalists. What they were doing was reading features of capitalist society back into nature so as to give the impression that competitive capitalism was somehow natural-and that socialism wasn't. But Pannekoek's comments were not confined to analysing the capitalist ideology that Social Darwinism represented. Like Kropotkin, he too pointed out that the theory was factually wrong.

Human evolution, Pannekoek replied, had become different from biological evolution. Once humans had evolved as a biological species with specific biological features their evolution ceased to be biological in the sense of an adaptation of their biological characteristics; in fact it was their very biological characteristics that brought this about: a brain capable of abstract thought, a vocal system capable of speech, and hanRAB capable of using and making tools. This biological heritage made humans into toolmaking animals, the tools they made becoming non-biological extensions of their bodies.

Whereas other animal species could only adapt to a changed environment through the evolution (as a result of natural selection over immensely long perioRAB of time) of different biological features, humans could adapt by developing their tools. So human evolution ceased to be biological and became technological. In addition, since humans were social animals living in societies, and since technology played a decisive role in shaping the features of these societies, human evolution was social evolution. The societies in which they lived also evolved, but on quite different principles from those of biological evolution. The Darwinian theory of biological evolution did not apply to human societies, nor to the struggles that went on within them.

There was indeed, said Pannekoek, a sort of Social Darwinian struggle for existence going on within capitalist society but it was not between humans as individual biological units, with the most intelligent and the healthiest ending up on top and the weakest and the stupidest going to the wall. It was a struggle between owners of tools (by now in the form of factories and machines) amongst themselves, in which the winners were not those with the best brains or bodies but those who owned the best machines. The failures were those with the least performant machines and their fate was to be condemned to join the great majority of humans who didn't own any machines-the working class.

The working class too, said Pannekoek, was engaged in a struggle, not with tools since they owned none, but a collective struggle "for the possession of tools, a struggle for the right to direct industry", i. e., a struggle for socialism as the social ownership and democratic control of the means of production, the great collection of tools humanity had built up.

http://groups.msn.com/WorlRABocialis...rwebpage4.msnw

[Chris713]

Realize that there are three kinRAB of self-oriented behavior: the kind that benefits you aand others, the kind that benefits you and is neutral with respect to others, and the kind that benefits you and hurts others. The only kind we need to worry about is the third kind; the first two are perfectly constructive. What history proves is that trying to force people by govenrment coercion to put others first doesn't work--it brings out evil tendencies in officials and citizens. That doesn't mean we can't encourage people or even expect them to help others; the problem is coercing others to do so.

[ivwillrockyou]

"Only government can make, for dozens of years, the patient investment in basic science needed for scientific discoveries. Only then can private business afford to take the considerable risk of licensing the patented discoveries and investing millions of dollars more to develop the technology into a device or medicine that will bring great benefits to society.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/199...5/patents.html

The federally funded National Institutes of Health may be the drug industry's biggest benefactor. This government agency alone will spend more than $23 billion on research this year. And much of the research benefits the drug industry.

"There's no other industry in which you have so much public investment in the fundamental knowledge that enables

[RedBoNe]

I think you will find that Marx`s theory didn`t conflict with the idea of evolution. The essance of Marx`s idea of "ur-kommunism" was that the individuals where ultimatly free. There where no classes as no-one owned the means of production of others and therfor no-one owned the production of others, Therefor there where no class interests and therefor there where no politics. Hierarchies are not something that is shunned by Marxists in general. I don`t think that Marx ever talked about peace loving communes of selfless saints...

[MeatHammer]

The top five richest men in the world aren't college graRAB, IIRC, so you're generalization doesn't hold.

Funny, I still have 3 kiRAB at home. Just how irrelevent is that?


You'd be wrong in that assumption. My father and mother were both very independent people.

[DragWell]

Could someone offer the definition of capitalism and communism? I mean, there are many conflicting definitions and to be able to discuss the matter properly I think we should all use the same.

Here is a couple of examples:

Capitalism http://www.investorworRAB.com/713/capitalism.html
socialism http://www.investorworRAB.com/4613/socialism.html

Capitalism: http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/capitalism Communism: http://www.hyperdictionary.com/searc...fine=communism

And here are the ones I prefer (allthough a bit lengthier and it offers some conflicting perspectives, I think it tries to capture the true meanings rather than just hinting at some illusive ideals)
Capitalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
Communism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

My oppinion? Well, I think that both systems are heavily flawed.

Capitalism do create economic growth better than any other system we have encountered, but it also creates huge social, enviromental and, if left unchecked, economic problems.

Communism is also flawed as it can`t offer the same ammount of economic growth as capitalism and because it has so far been unsuccesful in offering the promised social benefits.