Quote from: TwitchySeal on October 14, 2024, 12:25:39 AM

Quote from: Poker Player on October 13, 2024, 09:09:05 AM

Quote from: suchmoon on October 11, 2024, 06:42:59 PM

LOL... houses?

Our discussions remind me of the never-ending story.

The point here is that TwitchySeal has started giving me lessons on communist theory when I am not ignorant of it, far from it, by saying that

Quote from: TwitchySeal on October 09, 2024, 02:18:14 AM

In a communist society, people don't own property.

when the fact is that people did own property.

Quote from: suchmoon on October 11, 2024, 06:42:59 PM

Typical soviet family had to wait years to be able get an allocation to "buy" a car.

I know, I know, it's not the first time I've put this joke on the forum:

Reagan Joke -- Soviet Union and Getting A New Automobile

The fact is that no matter how you put it, in communist countries there is private property, no matter how much you want to put things in quotation marks or how much there are differences with private property in the free world.

Quote from: suchmoon on October 11, 2024, 06:42:59 PM

And that wasn't even communism, that was just what they called socialism in progress of building communism.

This is what many communists claim (I'm not saying you do), as if to say that real communism has never been implemented and that when it is implemented it will be wonderful. For me it is the opposite, if what has been implemented that has not reached Marx's ideal but almost, if it is implemented what tens of millions of starving and freezing dead will seem like child's play.

On the other hand, I do not know how there are people who take Marx's ideas as a pious person takes the bible. Marx was a violent drunkard who was imprisoned for it and who led a bourgeois life, an example of “do as I say but not as I do”.

Quote from: suchmoon on October 11, 2024, 06:42:59 PM

Not sure how you could read the article you linked to and think "yeah that proves soviets had private property" even though it's a lengthy description how far from actual ownership and free market the whole thing was... and then also think that the US is anywhere near that.

You seem like a broken record. Look at how Venezuela was in January 1999. Do you think it was anywhere near that?

Quote from: suchmoon on October 11, 2024, 06:42:59 PM

I'm sorry, that's just nonsense.

It isn't.

Quote from: suchmoon on October 11, 2024, 06:42:59 PM

You can take some of Trump's promises and say this leads to communism just as easily.

As I responded to TwitchySeal earlier, that's based on very selective cherry-picking. The mainstream measures of political economy have nothing to do with what Marx advocated.

Quote from: suchmoon on October 11, 2024, 06:42:59 PM

There are some bullshit policies on Kamala's side too, it's fair to ridicule them but again, saying that those things somehow relate to communism is absurd and makes no sense outside of the whatever infobubble you pulled that from.

What is not infobubble no matter how much you want to use that term to disqualify the argument is that Kamala explicitly says she wants a society where everyone ends up equal, and that is a commonality of all communist societies that have been implemented, that everyone ends up equally poor thanks to a state that is dedicated to planning the economy rather than leaving it in the hands of free interacting individuals. What is also not infobubble is the taste for censorship from Democrat/Labor/Socialist positions. What Kamala wants to do is to increase state power and control, in economics not only by increasing regulations and taxes, but by putting in place CBDCs, which are a financial Big Brother, censor what might hurt the Democratic party, and create a population increasingly dependent on the crumbs given to them by the state instead of a population that can stand on its own feet. That has a lot more to do with communism than what Trump wants to do, which is fine with me if he sticks a rocket up his ass and blows himself up, as long as whoever replaces him advocates policies more prone to the free market.

Quote from: Hispo on October 12, 2024, 01:11:20 PM

There something I don't understand, though.
If Kamala Harris is such a Deranged socialist/communist as people from the Republican party claims her to be, how come she has secured millions of dollars in donations from corporations like Google? ...

I don't get it.

Good point. In my opinion because the regulations and taxes that the Democrats tend to put in place are easy for those large mega corporations to comply with and difficult for small and medium sized businesses to comply with, thus favoring them. And on the other hand because there is nothing new about the phenomenon of communist wealthy people, such as Marx who, as I have explained before, was a bourgeois.

Then they see themselves as saviors of the world from their billionaire mansions, for example by defending mass immigration, when they do not suffer from it. An example is when the governor of Florida sent a busload of illegal immigrants to Marta's vineyard, a self proclaimed sanctuary against immigration (of billionaires) they didn't even last 24 hours.

Ok, so Karl Marx is not a valid source for defining the concept of communism. My mistake. I assume Engels is also out.

So when was your definition of communism born? And who is behind it?

Joseph McCarthy? That would make a lot of sense considering the connection to Trump. But does calling all your enemies communist really redefine communism itself? Embracing ignorance like that makes me uncomfortable - especially on something that was started by Nazi sympathizers. So I hope it's not McCarthy.

Yep, most people in the US think of Communism as a swear word. They have not really reflected on what it means, what could have positive, and - in my view - how is it utterly unrealisable, as it ignores some of the most basic human aspirations and motivations, while focusing only on a few of these.

The mindset is simplistic: communism means the state takes from me to give others. They do not need to know anything else.