marxism on wgn-fm

[Justin Schwartz]

Glad to have you on board. The point about the body count is that both 
Stalinism and capitalsim have unacceptably high body counts. Incidentaly, 
few of us here would defend Stalinism, the historical embodiments of 
so-called Marxism in the USSR, China, etc. A few, but not many, and not me. 
So the question isn't really, which if these evils is worse, but can't we do 
better?

Morever, apart from Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge on the commie side and 
Nazi Germany on the capitalist side, few regimes have actually made 
"thinning the population" a deliberate goal; the question, if we are looking 
for appraising the ethical effects of an economic system, is in part, what 
system is most harmful to human life and well being?

Here the answer is complex. Capitalism has brought the greatest advances in 
human well being in human history, immense increases in longevity, wealth, 
productivity, etc. At the same time, it has also brought the most terrible 
wars in history, as nations now armed with the mighty wepons capitalism has 
enabled them to create struggle for resources and domination. It has 
intensified the effect of famines, indeed created them, by subjecting 
nations to dependence on cash crops that are subject to the vageries of 
weather and markets. It has polarized the wealth it has created, so that a 
few thousand people in the rich countries have more wealth than the poorest 
half of the Earth's six billion. And so forth.

Historical communism, on the other hand, involved great and terrible 
slaughters--the Soviet collectizativazation famine and the Chinese Great 
Leap Forward famine, neither intended, both perfectly foreseeable; as well 
as many millions of deaths due to repression. At the asme time, Communsim 
made it possible for many poor people to have a decent life that would have 
been denied them under capitalism. After all, what capitalism has to offer 
people in the third world is not, for the most part, what we have, but 
unending degradation, exploitation, and starvation. A Salvadoran peasant who 
woke up in Cuba would think she'd died and gone to heaven. Free, quality 
medical care! Good education! Yeah, sure, food is short: it was shorter in 
El Salvador. Yeah, you can't criticize the government. But you couldn't in 
El Salvadoe.

So it's not a one-off. Ask a Russian today if he was better of ten or 
fifteen years ago. But that doesn't make the old USSR a good model. 
Stalinism is unacceptable. But it's over. Capitalism _is_ unacceptable. The 
question is still, can we do better?

--jks


>From: "George Thomas" <george.thomas at graffiti.net>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Subject: Re: marxism on wgn-fm
>Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 09:09:15 +0800
>
>
>Justin Schwartz:
>Not everyone here is a Marxist, but we all here see the world through Marx
>colored glasses. Hereabouts, that isn't an insult. In fact, the denial of 
>it is an insult. We are not dogmatic about it, and we welcome libertarians, 
>conservatives, and liberals who come to learn and teach; we have had 
>several at various points on the list. But we are not going to defend our 
>general left perspective against an all points attack that presumes, as the 
>mainstream perspective in our society presumes, that we have the burden of 
>proof on everything. We have to do that in the outside world all the time 
>anyway. If you want to play on those terms, and can swallow your revulsion 
>at our Through the Looking Glass assumptions, contributing what you can, 
>you'll get along. Otherwise people will regard you as a troll.
>
>+++++++++++++++++++++
>
>I can see how my activities might be regarded as trolling, so let me say 
>here that I acknowledge problems with capitalism.  However, I find the 
>blanket assertion of capitalism's responsibility for more deaths than 
>marxism to be uncompelling on it's face, even Davis must resort to external 
>factors such as weather to ground his claim.  Marxist regimes did not have 
>an overt goal of thinning their populations, did they?  Why should we 
>assume capitalism does, just because there was a famine and key individuals 
>hardened their hearts to the plight of the hardest hit?  The abuses 
>documented in history are not properly saddled on any economic system in my 
>view, although some economic systems do lend themselves to these and other 
>sorts of abuse more readily than others.  In all cases, it is the people 
>involved, and not the economic system per se, that deserve blame.
>
>George Thomas
>
>
>
>
>--
>_______________________________________________
>Get your free email from http://www.graffiti.net

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