We Can Work It Out - Politics & Philosophy | Page 77 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

QuarryMan said
The missing link here seems to be the vast amounts of company revenue which are devoted to the salary of the CEO. That money, redirected, could easily top up the paycheques of the workers without needing to raise prices or disadvantage consumers.

Basically, the hierarchical organisation of business with power concentrated right at the top (this is what Marx meant when he said “private ownership of the means of production”) is unnecessary and screws everyone else over. 

  

Marx’s philosophy as lovely as it sounds to you has always failed.……And many have died directly because of it. 

You really need to do your reading on this.

QuarryMan said

Wigwam said

Don’t give me the slavery argument…Slavery has been around as long as humans have. It was the compassionate capitalism of the UK more than any other country that brought about its ending…….1/6th of Britain’s GNP was devoted to it’s forcible control…And the loans the UK took out then were only finally paid off this century.

Short on arguments the left typically rush to harp on about slavery….. to cast us all in the very worst of bad lights…… but conveniently never mention Britain’s role in its demise……… 

Are you serious? The UK’s ‘compassionate capitalism’ wouldn’t have had to end the Transatlantic slave trade if it hadn’t, you know, started it in the first place… (along with Portugal and France; I believe it was Portugal who first kidnapped African people). Are you seriously expecting us to applaud the UK for that? It’s like saying “actually, Hitler was a pretty good guy. After all, he did kill Hitler”.  Ridding the world of an evil you created doesn’t make you a saint, it makes you the bare minimum. 

As for Marx he saw the progression of civilisation  in the stages……Feudalism…..Capitalism…….Socialism…..and finally Communism…….’society perfected’

Implicit in this was that the perfect society can only be brought about by Revolution …….The forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions….’.Let the ruling classes tremble’…….This strain of thought justifies and glorifies violence…..

As for nuance….Communist leaders from Stalin to Mao and up to the present day have talked in nuances…… while the mountains of skulls grow behind them.

I’ve read enough about the Soviet Union to know that more than it’s economic failures and the expansion and violence to its own citizens of the Red Army it was it’s hostility to the married family and personal life that was so chilling….This is becoming ‘observable in movements of the cultural left in the west’

Again, this is the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Marx’s works, which I explained pretty clearly I’m against. Attack ML’s all you like, you haven’t engaged with my points at all.

Quarryman said: 

As for capitalism’s rewards for hard work, determination, individuality and innovation.. studies from institutions such as MIT have shown that the profit motive capitalism provides is insufficient and ineffective in these regards. Profits are shown to be an effective incentive only for simple, physical tasks. For any task requiring a higher level of cognitive ability, the best incentives are autonomy, mastery and purpose. Capitalism isn’t great at providing any of these things.  

You really need to think that through…….

Do I? I cited an academic source for what I’ve said, do you take issue with their conclusions? I can link the study, if you like. 

  

Slavery didn’t begin with the Portuguese or the British…Though I can see how you might think so……

Any cursory search on Google such as ‘When did slavery begin?’ takes you mysteriously to summaries that begin that way and always relate directly to the US slave trade…..As though slavery wasn’t an established practice throughout the world predating the wearing of ‘wode’ in the British Isles. It is only for the British and Americans to bear responsibility…It suggests slavery began with them…It didn’t…You do know that!?

‘White guilt’ which I don’t have any time for…..(I don’t believe in racial guilt)  is always the left’s objective and the truth of the matter is completely ignored because it wouldn’t serve that purpose…

Yes…. I do expect you to recognise that slavery has always been a blight on humanity, that not a single slave would have left Africa without the active cooperation of Africans..And to applaud loudly or at the very least give some credit to the only country in history that expended its blood and treasure to bring about its end…….Although I should mention the US did contribute too ‘later in the day’ 

As for the Hitler comparison? (A National Socialist by-the-way)…..It does you no favours and the less said the better.  

Back to the failures of Marxism…….

It’s often claimed by ‘Marxists’ that other Marxists or leaders that use Marxist doctrines used the wrong type of Marxism and that it wasn’t pure Marxism….Ergo the failures and the deaths can’t be attributed to Marx…..

Whether that claim is right or wrong borders on belief either way…..I just go by the history.

Despite the inequalities and its many faults Capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than any other system in history……Fact.

Cheers

QuarryMan said
Oh dear. If you read my last response, you’ll see that I specified I was talking about the Transatlantic slave trade, which was started by the Portuguese and intensified with the involvement of other European countries, primarily us Brits, who apparently deserve a gold medal for realising several hundred years later that forcibly kidnapping millions of people and shipping them across the ocean to work in appalling conditions wasn’t the most morally defensible thing to do. The UK doesn’t even really deserve that defence anyway, since it had lost much of its profitability by 1833 regardless, so it was in the UK’s interests to move away from it even without all the work of the abolitionists. 

Anyways, the older examples of slavery aren’t related to capitalism because they existed pre-industrial Revolution . The development of capitalism was directly tied to this slave trade, because it helped finance the industrial Revolution in the UK and elsewhere (in the UK, it wasn’t so much a contributor to the industrial Revolution as colonialism in Africa was, but the two are directly related for obvious reasons). In the US for example, historians often downplay the role of slavery in the nation’s early prosperity that established it as a great power, but more than half of its exports before the 1860s were cotton, the vast majority of which was grown in slave plantations. 

If Hitler was a socialist because it was in the name, then the Democratic Republic of North Korea is a democracy. In reality, that name was chosen very early on to attract working class people, but the socialist faction in the party (The Strasserists) were purged during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Socialism in its simplest form simply means public or worker’s control of the means of production, which isn’t the same thing as state control. In Nazi Germany, Hitler actually privatised large amounts of industry (the term privatisation was coined to describe his policies), consolidating them with state power in a military-industrial complex. 

Nowhere have I claimed that the failures and deaths of past regimes can’t be attributed to Marx – you can justify dictatorship from his writings, and that was most likely a considered factor in the makeup of the states inspired by his works, who mostly were controlled by small groups of extremely powerful individuals. For that, I am as critical of Marx as you are. The difference is that you just switch off at even the mention of the term, assuming that Marxism-Leninism is the only possible way to interpret his writings, when there is a great deal of evidence to the contrary. 

  

1.Yes you were referring selectively to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade but in doing so you ignored the much longer history of slavery and acceptance over centuries of the reality of slavery.

Check out white slavery and the Corsairs……Perhaps Europeans should claim reparations from the Ottomans 

2. I partially agree some of the profit from slavery had been reduced……But a good deal of the cost of ending the slave trade to the US and the Caribbean was the cost of compensation to slave ‘dealers’ for their losses. 

3.That you continues to churlishly refuse to give the only country that decided the slave trade was immoral and set about stopping it; at enormous cost to its exchequer and diverting it’s fleet during times of war ……..is for your conscience to balance.

4.If capitalism was directly the cause of slavery then capitalism has existed as long as slavery has and it hasn’t…….But perhaps it’s worth noting it was a capitalist country that put an end to it.

5. If Britain’s and the US’ wealth was due to slavery why isn’t Brazil, who imported 4 times as many slaves 4 times as wealthy?…And why is it that the two main countries that put an end to slavery are held in such contempt while Brazil’s record never gets a mention??

6. Your Hitler reference sounds like a cut-and-paste to me and should really be in quotation marks…….But you’re right in that Hitler was a socialist in name only…….However, like Mussolini’s fascist party both was was born out of socialism…..Not from right wing politics……That’s often forgotten or conveniently ignored.

The National Socialist party was spawned by the terrible conditions imposed on Germany’s population, mostly by France after WWI……The unrest and discontent that stemmed from these impositions particularly coal shortages was used by Hitler to build his power and influence. 

7. Many have interpreted Marx…… not least Lenin who as an agent of Imperial Germany violently put down the first Russian Revolution in 1917 in admittedly an almost bloodless putsch but led on directly on to a sea of blood, secret police repression and internment camps….The Revolution of 1917 had ironically been  designed at turning  Russia for the first time by a fair election into a liberal democracy……..The dead hand of socialist Lenin suppressed the results and brutally clamped down on the population……bastard!

I take you argument that maybe Marx’s words lend themselves to being twisted ….(like religions are)…..but a large number of socialist by name leaders that have invoked the name of Marx ……And the results are ALWAYS the same……Socialism/communism  has never worked and I believe given the proof of so many failures and the frailty of our species it never will.

You’re welcome to a different view…..

But…….

Please don’t say I don’t even try to engage with you.

Cheers 

Let’s leave it there then ….Thanks for the engagement and we can announce an amicable divorce.…5555

….and hope the cold gets better……Zinc and fruit my friend.