Quote from: Findeton on July 07, 2011, 06:22:00 AM

Quote from: bustaballs on July 06, 2011, 11:14:33 PM

Also, you can refer to Karl Marx all day but that's just going to make you look like a literal communist.

Well, I couldn't care less about what other people might think. Also, I don't see why people are scared of communists, I think most of them are good people. Well, I do know why, because of USA USA USA USA USA propaganda.

I don't buy into the "let's plan all the economy altogether" thing. But the analysis Karl Marx does of Capitalism is VERY interesting and just because I don't like the solution he gives I won't stop reading Das Kapital.

It looks to me like KARL MARX and COMMUNISM are taboos for many americans. Well, they are no taboo for me and I cannot cease to be amused every time I mention them in front of an american. ("Hey, he said SEX, he must be a pervert!", "Hey, he said MARX, he must be a communist!").

Quote from: bustaballs on July 06, 2011, 11:14:33 PM

As we saw in the 20th century, socialism doesn't work. It destroys entire economies and leads to the worst kinds of human suffering imaginable. I just can't believe how after over a hundred million people died due to this flawed idea, so many people still support it. It's like these people don't want to understand basic facts. They are "flat-worlders".

- The surplus value is a theory that analyzes Capitalism, not a theory that analyzes communism.
- He didn't invent the surplus value theory, he just made it famous.
- USSR actually worked somehow between 1917 and 1991. of course it was a monstrous thing, but it worked somehow and it actually turned a peasant rural country into a technological superpower.
- Millions of people die because of famines every year under capitalism's rule. It's a valid comparison: most of the people that died under communism died because of famines.

Quote from: compro01 on July 07, 2011, 02:54:41 AM

ok, let's try quoting a different author then.

"Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds make up far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part is of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged. "

"The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the necessary effect, so it is the natural symptom of increasing national wealth. The scanty maintenance of the labouring poor, on the other hand, is the natural symptom that things are at a stand, and their starving condition, that they are going fast backwards."

Adam Smith.

If you're actually interested in level headed analysis you should check out the unabomber manifesto. of course it mostly isn't anything *new*, but it is put together in an fairly efficient way.