Issues you kinda sorta side with the Communists on

[Taverner]

This is not a joke thread - I just thought I'd take in the opposite direction.

If you know me, you know I'm a Communist Sympathizer at the least...

So, for me, the biggest is "From each, according to their ability. To each, according to their need."

[KamaAina]

1. Race

the CPUSA was on the right side of the race issue as early as the 1930s -- easily a generation before any other organized faction of society. That's why Paul Robeson joined.

[Taverner]

2. Yep. Of course the IWW was on the right side of race as early as the turn of the century

The last one that is

[HardTimes99]

14. The CP stood against South African apartheid long before it became fashionable in

white liberal circles to stand against it. Joe Slovo, chairman of the South African CP, was an important member of the ANC.

[Taverner]

16. Joe Slovo definitely deserves much more recognition than he got

Being a member of parliament for years, he was a kind of Joe Biden

So he was able to bring together all parties and get them to negotiate

Master arbitrator that man....

[Blue_Tires]

24. +1

[sinkingfeeling]

3. Well, if one looks at Marx's top 10 tenets.....

Marx also detailed the 10 essential tenets of communism, namely:
•Central banking system
•Government controlled education
•Government controlled labor
•Government ownership of transportation and communication vehicles
•Government ownership of agricultural means and factories
•Total abolition of private property
•Property rights confiscation
•Heavy income tax on everyone
•Elimination of rights of inheritance
•Regional planning

there's several I agree with. Central banking, government education, heavy income tax, and regional planning. We could get into a more detailed discussion of the need for government ownership of transportation, control of labor, and maybe what's fair in the inheritance department.

[Taverner]

5. Lemme throw a disclaimer in there: Private Property =/= Personal Property

Your home, bed, tools, TV, those are personal property

Land, or anything used to make capital is private property

[sinkingfeeling]

6. I'm not against private property, but I also demand some public property.

The public property is what we're in danger of losing completely in the USA.

[Eddie Haskell]

4. A more equal distribution of wealth

[AngryAmish]

7. Destruction of royalty

[NuclearDem]

8. Technology, medicine, and other means of production being used for the betterment of humanity

Not to drive the profits of the corporate machine.

[HardTimes99]

9. Today's Republicans are fascists by another name. (Interestingly, Karl Marx

and Abraham Lincoln exchanged correspondence, IIRC.)

[Taverner]

15. They did. And Marx wrote a great piece about the Civil War.

[geek tragedy]

10. Agree: the majority of the diagnosis of the problems.

Disagree: the majority of the recommended solutions.

[Taverner]

17. Understood

Capital is an excellent diagnosis of Capitalism

The recommended solutions were all hypothesises at the time

Some were good (distribution of resources, proletariat equality)

Some were bad (Labor Theory Value, central control)

[HardTimes99]

18. Specifics, please? - nt

Last edited Wed Jul 17, 2013, 04:34 PM - Edit history (1)

[Starry Messenger]

19. You might be surprised. The CP were big boosters of Social Security, for example.

Most people like that program now.

[geek tragedy]

20. I said most. ;)

In general, some combination of socialism and capitalism is necessary.

[Starry Messenger]

21. :)

I think most people at DU also generally agree that many big corporations being overly involved in democracy has a negative effect on society.

Small private businesses and a mix of more public control of the "commanding heights" of the economy wouldn't come amiss.

[Taverner]

23. Even the Soviets tolerated mom and pop shops even during Stalinist times

Granted, they would send people to inventory all of their plates and equipment as it was declared state property. And this turned into a protection racket, but yeah.

[olddots]

11. I know nothing about Communism

and less about Capitalism .Each construct has good ideas but seem to chose bad leaders .

[Taverner]

13. That speaks to the Anarchist in me

No gods, no masters, no leaders!

[forestpath]

12. I agree with your biggest!

[PD Turk]

22. Vodka

....and cigars

[HiPointDem]

25. "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas...The ruling ideas are nothing

more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

"capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks"

"religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. it is the opium of the people...The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness"

"necessity is blind until it becomes conscious; freedom is the consciousness of necessity"

"in bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality while the living person is dependent and has no individuality"

'the more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition among the workers extend, the more do their wages shrink altogether'

"The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society."

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save - the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour - your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life - the greater is the store of your estranged being.”

“All freed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away (by capitalism), all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

“Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”

“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.”