On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 4:19 AM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2 April 2015 at 15:18, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 LizR <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >>> >> In practice Communism was evil but in theory it was just stupid >>>> >>>> > Almost as stupid as capitalism, >>> >> >> The defining characteristic of stupid is that stupid doesn't work, so >> regardless of what you may personally think of capitalism's ethics (and >> there is no disputing matters of taste) the fact remains that if capitalism >> was stupider than communism then it wouldn't have won the 40 year long face >> to face confrontation with it. >> > > It didn't. Communism hasn't been tried except at the tribal/village level > (you're getting confused because some people called themselves communist). >
The same claim can be made about anything. Reality never seems to conform to the idealized version of any political theory. Communism has a blueprint, "The Communist Manifesto" by Marx and Engels. Several societies of varying sizes and cultural backgrounds attempted to implement these ideas. In all cases so far, the results have been horrendous. I have no doubt that this is not the outcome that Marx desired, but there is now strong empirical evidence that this is the outcome you get when applying the idea to societies of human beings. > My point is that capitalism is in the process of destroying the world, so > it hasn't "won" anything and may well lose the entire human experiment > thanks to the greed of a few short sighted individuals. > If the world is indeed being destroyed by pollution, then this is being done by a complex network of cooperation between communist, capitalist and autocratic nations, of which a communist nation is the biggest polluter. Yes, maybe Chinese communism is not what Marx had in mind, but western capitalism is not what the intellectuals who defend capitalism have in mind either. The "no true Scotsman" brigade will not help us here. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
