<!--QuoteBegin--MonsieurEvil+Oct 28 2003, 09:25 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (MonsieurEvil @ Oct 28 2003, 09:25 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> Sure, you can draw all the conclusions you want. They will not be representative statistically though until you increase that count times ~250. <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo--> Is this apropos of something? <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd--> You know what I mean <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo--> How can you make judgements when there have been so few communist countries in the world? USSR, China, Cuba, NK, Burma. <-- of that list, I can probably cross off two of those (NK and Burma) because they were really totalitarianisms <b>fronting</b> as communisms from the start. The other three, in their early days (China especially), were pretty accurate socialist countries, but by the end forget it. Anyway, the point is that saying that "they never work" based on the first few years of 3 countries is like determining that evolution is impossible by shaking a bottle with a vitamin tablet inside. (But you'll win at the <a href='http://objective.jesussave.us/creationsciencefair.html' target='_blank'>Creation Science Fair</a> :x) (note, that is a hoax site like landoverbaptist, I think [hope])
And menix... <!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->a jacuzzi is a necessity for someone who wants to live with a jacuzzi. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> that's ridiculous!! <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif'><!--endemo--> It is most certainly not a necessity. I want to have thirty-six beautiful blondes with me in bed this very moment. Is that a desperate wish? oh yeah. Necessity? No.
<!--QuoteBegin--Menix+Oct 28 2003, 06:06 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Menix @ Oct 28 2003, 06:06 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> <!--QuoteBegin--Windelkron+Oct 27 2003, 11:30 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Windelkron @ Oct 27 2003, 11:30 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Food and shelter aren't material possessions, they are necessities. Having a jacuzzi is a material possession.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> That's meaningless. Food is not a necessity for someone who wants to die and a jacuzzi is a necessity for someone who wants to live with a jacuzzi. You can't list everything under these two categories and expect to be treated seriously since necessity depends on situation and material posessions can fulfill necessities. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd--> You're done, in so many ways, with this topic...
Since when have other people had the right to tell me what I should and should not try to get for myself. Capitalism says "You want it, work hard and get it." Communism says "You want it? Tough, you need to work for the state so everyone can be equal."
PLEASE READ THIS WHOLE POST. IT'S LONG, BUT VERY WORTH IT.
<b>Atlas Shrugged </b>
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> "Well, there was something that happened at that plant where I worked for twenty years. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they brought a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and everybody - almost everybody - voted for it. We didn't know. We thought it was good. No, that's not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good. The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need. We - what's the matter, ma'am? Why do you look like that?"
"What was the name of the factory?" she asked her voice barely audible.
"The Twentieth Century Motor Company, ma'am, of Starnesville, Wisconsin."
"Go on."
"We voted for that plan at a big meeting, with all of us present, six thousand of us, everybody that worked in the factory. The Starnes heirs made long speeches about it, and it wasn't clear, but nobody asked any questions. None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouth shut - because they made it sound like anyone who'd oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a human being. They told us that the plan would achieve a noble idea. Well, how were we to know otherwise? Hadn't we heard it all our lives - from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every newspaper we ever read and every movie and every public speech? Hadn't we always been told that this was righteous and just? Well, maybe there's some excuse for what we did at that meeting. Still, we voted for the plan - and what we got, we had it coming to us. You know, ma'am, we are marked men, in a way, those of us who lived through the four years of that plan of the Twentieth Century factory. What is it that hell is supposed to be? Evil - plain, naked smirking evil, isn't it? Well, that's what we saw and helped to make - and I think we're damned, every one of us, and maybe we'll never be forgiven... "Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people? Try pouring water into a tank where there's a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you can pour, and each bucket you bring breaks the pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours per week, then forty-eight, then fifty-six - for your neighbor’s supper, for his wife's operation - for his child's measles - for his mother's wheel chair - for his uncle's shirt - for his nephew's schooling - for the baby next door - for the baby to be born - for anyone anywhere around you - it's theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures - and yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month, year after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hope, without end.... From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.... "We're all one big family, they told us, we're all in this together. But you don't all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day - together, and you don’t all get a bellyache - together. What's whose ability and which of whose needs come first? When it's all in one pot, you can't let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht - and if his feeling is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it's not right for me to own a car until I've worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth - why can't he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability and have not collapsed? No? He can't? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he's replastered his living room? Oh well... Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We *voted* on it. Yes ma'am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars - rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn't belong to him, it belonged to 'the family,' and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his 'need' - so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife's head colds, hoping that 'the family' would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because its miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm - so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that *his* need was worse than his brother's. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot? "But that wasn't all. There was also something else that we discovered at the same meeting. The factory's production had fallen by forty per cent, in that first half-year, so it was decided that somebody hadn't delivered 'according to his ability.' Who? How would you tell it? 'The family' voted on that, too. They voted which men were the best, and these men were sentenced to work overtime each night for the next six months. Overtime without pay - because you weren't paid by time and you weren't paid by work, only by need. "Do I have to tell you what happened after that - and into what sort of creatures we all started turning, we who had once been human? We began to hide whatever ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we never worked any faster or better than the next fellow. What else could we do, when we knew that if we did our best for 'the family,' it's not thanks or rewards that we'd get, but punishment? We knew that for every stinker who'd ruin a batch of motors and cost the company money - either through is sloppiness, because he didn't have to care, or through plain incompetence - it's we who'd have to pa with our nights and our Sundays. So we did our best to be no good. "There was one young boy who started out, full of fire for the noble ideal, a bright kid without any schooling, but with a wonderful head on his shoulders. The first year, he figured out a work process that saved us thousands of man-hours. He gave it to 'the family,' didn't ask anything for it either, couldn't ask, but that was alright with him. It was for the ideal, he said. But when he found himself voted as one of our ablest and sentenced to night work because we hadn't got enough from him, he shut his mouth and his brain. You can bet he didn't come up with any ideas, the second year. "What was it they always told us about the vicious competition of the profit system, where men had to compete for who'd do a better job than his fellows? Vicious, wasn't it? Well, they should have seen what it was like when we all had to compete one another for who'd do the worst job possible. There's no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at *not* doing his best, were he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day. That will finish him quicker than drink or idleness or pulling stick-ups for a living. But there was nothing else for us to do except to fake unfitness. The one accusation we feared was to be suspected of ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay off. And what was there to work for? You knew that your basic pittance would be given to you anyway, whether you worked or not - your 'housing and feeding allowance,' it was called - and above that pittance, you had no chance to get anything, no matter how hard you tried. You couldn't count on buying a new suit of clothes next year - they might give you a 'clothing allowance' or they might not, according to whether nobody broke a leg, needed an operation or gave birth to more babies. And if there wasn't enough money for new suits for everybody, then you couldn't get yours, either. "There was one man who worked hard all his life, because he always wanted to send his son through college. Well, the boy graduated from high school in the second year of the plan, but 'the family' wouldn't give the father any 'allowance' for the college. They said his son couldn't go to college, until we had enough to send everybody's sons to college - and that we first had to send everybody's children through high school, and we didn't even have enough for that. The father died the following year, in a knife fight with somebody in a saloon, a fight over nothing in particular - such fights were beginning to happen among us all the time. "Then there was an old guy, a widower with no family, who had one hobby: phonograph records. I guess that was all he ever got out of life. In the old days, he used to skip meals just to buy himself some new recording of classical music. Well, they didn't give him any 'allowance' for records - 'personal luxury,' they called it. But at that same meeting, Millie Bush, somebody's daughter, a mean, ugly little eight year-old, was voted a pair of gold braces for her buck teeth - this was 'medical need,' because the staff psychologist had said that the poor girl would get an inferiority complex if her teeth weren't straightened out. The old guy who loved music, turned to drink instead. He got so you never saw him fully conscious anymore. But it seems there was one thing he couldn't forget. One night, he came staggering down the street, saw Millie Bush, swung his fist and knocked all her teeth out. Every one of them. "Drink, of course, was what we all turned to, some more, some less. Don't ask how we got the money for it. When all the decent pleasures are forbidden, there's always ways to get the rotten ones. You don't break into grocery stores after dark and you don't pick your fellow's pockets to buy classical symphonies or fishing tackle, but if it’s to get stinking drunk and forget - you do. Fishing tackle? Hunting guns? Snapshot cameras? Hobbies? There wasn't any 'amusement allowance' for anybody. 'Amusement' was the first thing they dropped. Aren't you always supposed to be ashamed to object when anybody asks you to give anything up, if it’s something that gave you pleasure? Even our 'tobacco allowance' was cut to where we got two packs of cigarettes a month - and this, they told us, was because the money had to go into the babies' milk fund. Babies was the only item of production that didn't fall, but rose and kept on rising - because people had nothing else to do, I guess, and because they didn't have to care, the baby wasn't their burden, it was 'the family's'. In fact, the best chance you had of getting a raise and breathing easier for a while was a 'baby allowance.' Either that, or a major disease. "It didn't take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to play it straight had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel's worth of tobacco or chew a stick of gum, worrying whether somebody had more need for that nickel. He felt ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed, wondering whose weary nights of overtime had paid for it, knowing that his food was not his by right, miserably wishing to be cheated rather than to cheat, to be a sucker, but not a blood-sucker. He wouldn't marry, he wouldn't help his folks back home, he wouldn't put an extra burden on 'the family.' Besides, if he still had some sort of sense of responsibility, he couldn't marry or bring children into the world, when he could plan nothing, promise nothing, count on nothing. But the shiftless and the irresponsible had a field day of it. They bred babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra 'disability allowance,' they got more sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture, their homes - what the hell, 'the family' was paying for it! They found more ways of getting in 'need' than the rest of us could ever imagine - they developed a skill for it, which was the only ability *they* showed. "God help us, ma'am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we'd been given a law to live by, a *moral* law, they called it, which punished those who observed it - for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man's dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness? We were a pretty decent bunch of fellows when we started. There weren't many chiselers among us. We knew our jobs as were proud of it and we worked for the best factory in the country, where old man Starnes hired nothing but the pick of the country's labor. Within one year under the new plan, there wasn't an honest man left among us. *That* was the evil, the sort of hell-horror evil that preachers used to scare you with, but you never thought to see alive. Not that the plan encouraged a few ****, but that it turned decent people into ****, and there was nothing else it could do - and it was called a moral ideal! "What was it we were supposed to want to work for? For the love of our brothers? What brothers? For the bums, the loafers, the moochers we saw all around us? And whether they were cheating or plain incompetent, whether they were unwilling or unable - what difference did that make to us? If we were tied for life to the level of their unfitness, faked or real, how long could we care to go on? We had no way of knowing their ability, we had no way of controlling their needs - all we knew was that we were beasts of burden struggling blindly in some sort of place that was half-hospital, half-stockyards - a place geared to nothing but disability, disaster, disease - beasts put there for the relief of whatever whoever chose to say was whichever's need. "Love of our brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man's new shirt, for another's wife's hat, for an outing with their family, for a paint job on their house - it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations, our denials, our hunger. We began to spy on one another, each hoping to catch the others lying about their needs, so as to cut their 'allowance' at the next meeting. We began to have stool pigeons who informed on people, who reported that someone bootlegged a turkey to his family on some Sunday - which he'd paid for by gambling, most likely. We began to meddle into one another's lives. We provoked family quarrels, to get somebody's relatives thrown out. Any time we saw a man starting to go steady with a girl, we made life miserable for him. We broke up many engagements. We didn't want anyone to marry, we didn't want any more dependents to feed. "In the old days, we used to celebrate if someone had a baby, we used to chip in and help out with the hospital bills, if he happened to be hard-pressed for the moment. Now, if a baby was born, we didn't speak to the parents for weeks. Babies, to us, had become what locusts were to farmers. In the old day, we used to help a man if he had a bad illness in the family. Now - well, I'll tell you about one case. It was the mother of a man who had been with us for fifteen years. She was a kindly old lady, cheerful and wise, she knew all of us by our first names and we all liked her - we used to like her. One day, she slipped on the cellar stairs and fell and broke her hip. We knew what that meant at that age. The staff doctor said that she have to be sent to a hospital in town, for expensive treatments that would take a long time. The old lady died the night before she was to leave for town. They never established the cause of death. No, I don't know whether she was murdered. Nobody said that. Nobody would talk about it at all. All I know is that I - and that's what I can't forget! - I, too, had caught myself wishing that she would die. This - may God forgive us! - was the brotherhood, the security, the abundance that the plan was supposed to achieve for us! "Was there any reason why this sort of horror would ever be preached by anybody? Was there anybody who got any profit from it? There was. The Starnes heirs. I hope you are not going to remind me that they sacrificed a fortune and turned the factory over to us as a gift. We were fooled by that one, too. Yes, they gave up the factory. But profit, ma'am, depends on what it is you're after. And what the Starnes heirs were after, no money on earth could buy. Money is too clean and innocent for that. "Eric Starnes, the youngest - he was a jellyfish that didn't have the guts to be anything in particular. He got himself voted as the Director of our Public Relations Department, which didn't do anything, except that he had a staff for the not doing of anything, so he didn't have to bother sticking around the office. The pay he got - well, I shouldn't call it 'pay,' none of us was 'paid' - the alms voted to him was fairly modest, about ten times what I got, but that wasn't riches. Eric didn't care for money - he wouldn't have known what to do with it. He spent his time hanging around among us, showing how chummy he was and democratic. He wanted to be loved, it seems. The way he went about it was to keep reminding us that he had given us the factory. We couldn't stand him. "Gerald Starnes was our Director of Production. We never learned just what the size of his rake-off - his alms - had been. It would have taken a staff of accountants to figure that out, and a staff of engineers to trace the way it was piped, directly or indirectly, into his office. None of it was supposed to be for him - it was all company expenses. Gerald had three cars, four secretaries, five telephones, and he used to throw champagne and caviar parties that no tax-paying tycoon in the country could have afforded. He spent more money in one year than his father had earned in profits in the last two years of his life. We saw a hundred-pound stack - a hundred pounds, we weighed them - of magazines in Gerald's office, full of stories about our factory and our noble plan, with big pictures of Gerald Starnes, calling him a great social crusader. Gerald liked to come into the shops at night, dressed in his formal clothes, flashing diamond cufflinks the size of a nickel and shaking cigar ashes all over. Any cheap show-off who's got nothing to parade about but his cash, is bad enough – except that he makes no bones about the cash being his, and you're free to gape at him or not, as you wish, and mostly don't. But when a **** like Gerald Starnes puts on an act and keeps spouting that he doesn't care for material wealth, that he's only serving 'the family,' that all the lushness is not for himself, but for our sake and for the common good, because it's necessary to keep to the prestige of the company and of the noble plan in the eyes of the public - then that's when you learn to hate the creature as you've never hated anything human. "But his sister Ivy was worse. She really did not care for material wealth. The alms she got were no bigger than ours, and she went about in scuffed flat-heeled shoes and shirtwaists - just to show how selfless she was. She was our Director of Distribution. She was the lady in charge of our needs. Of course, distribution was supposed to be decided by voting - by the voice of the people. But when the people are six-thousand howling voices, trying to decide without yardstick, rhyme or reason, where there are no rules to the game and each can demand anything, but has the right to nothing, when everybody holds power over everybody's life except his own - then it turns out, as it did, that the voice of the people is Ivy Starnes. By the end of the second year, we dropped the pretense of the 'family meetings' - in the name of 'production efficiency and time economy,' one meeting used to take ten days - all the petitions of need were simply sent to Miss Starnes' office. No, not sent. They had to be recited to her in person by every petitioner. Then she made up a distribution list, which she read to us for our vote of approval. There was a ten-minute period on the agenda for discussion and objections. We made no objections, we knew better by that time. Nobody can divide a factory's income among thousands of people, without some sort of gauge to measure people's value. Her gauge was bootlicking. Selfless? In her father's time, all of his money wouldn't have given him a chance to speak to his lousiest wiper and get away with it, as she spoke to our best skilled workers and their wives. She had pale eyes that looked fishy, cold and dead. And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who’d talked back to her once and who'd just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who's ever preached the slogan: 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.' "This was the whole secret of it. At first I kept wondering how it could be possible that the educated, the cultured, the famous men of the world could make a mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort of abomination - when five minutes of thought should have told them what would happen if somebody tried to practice what they preached. Now I know that they didn't do it by any mistake. Mistakes of this size are never made innocently. If some men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they have no may to make it work and no possible reason to explain their choice - it's because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell. And we weren't so innocent either, when we voted for that plan at the first meeting. We didn't do it just because we believed the drippy old guff they spewed was good. We had another reason, but the guff helped us hide it from our neighbors and from ourselves. The guff gave us a chance to pass off as virtues something that we'd be ashamed to admit otherwise. There wasn't a man voting for it who didn't think that under a setup of this kind he'd muscle in on the profits of the men abler than himself. There wasn't a man rich enough or smart enough but that he didn't think that somebody was richer and smarter, and this plan would give him a share of his better's wealth and brain. But while he was thinking that he'd get unearned benefits from the men above, he forgot about the men below who'd get unearned benefits, too. He forgot about all his inferiors who'd rush to drain him just as he hoped to drain his superiors. The worker who liked the idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss's, forgot that ever body and beggar on earth would come howling that *their* need entitled them to an icebox like his own. *That* was our real motive when we voted - that was the truth of it - but we didn't like to think it, so the less we liked it, the louder we yelled about our love for the common good. "Well, we got what we asked for. By the time we saw what it was that we'd asked for, it was too late. We were trapped, with no place to go. The best men among us left the factory in the first week of the plan. We lost our best engineers, superintendents, foremen and highest-skilled workers. A man of self-respect doesn't turn into a milk cow for anybody. Some able fellows tried to stick it out, but they couldn't take it for long. We kept losing our men, they kept escaping from the factory like a pesthole - till we had nothing left except the men of need, but none of the men of ability. "And the few of us who were still any good, but stayed on, were only those who had been there too long. In the old days, nobody ever quit the Twentieth Century - and, somehow, we couldn't make ourselves believe that it was gone. After a while, we couldn't quit, because no other employer would have us - for which I can't blame him. Nobody would deal with us in any way, no respectable person or firm. All the small shops, where we traded, started moving out of Starnesville fast, till we had nothing left but saloons, gambling joints and crooks who sold us trash at gouging prices. The alms we got kept falling, but the cost of our living kept rising. The list of the factory's needy kept stretching, but the list of customers shrank. There was less and less income to divide among more and more people. In the old days, it used to be said that the Twentieth Century Motor trademark was as good as the karat mark on gold. I don't know what it was that the Starnes heirs thought, if they thought at all, but I supposed that like all social planners and like savages, they thought this trademark was a magic stamp which did the trick by some sort of voodoo power and that it would keep them rich, as it had kept their father. Well, when our customers began to see that we never delivered an order on time and never put out a motor that didn't have something wrong with it – the magic stamp began to work the other way around: people wouldn't take a motor as a gift, if it was marked Twentieth Century. And it came to where our only customers were men who never paid and never meant to pay their bills. But Gerald Starnes, doped by his own publicity, got huffy and went around, with an air of moral superiority, demanding that businessmen place orders with us, not because out motors were good, but because we *needed* the orders so badly. "By that time, a village half-wit could see what generations of professors had pretended not to notice. What good would our need do to a power plant when its generator stopped because of our defective engines? What good would it do a man caught on an operating table when the electric light went out? What good would it do the passengers of a plane when its motor failed in mid-air? And if they bought our product, not because of its merit, but because of our need, what would be the good, the right, the moral thing to do for the owner of that power plant, the surgeon in that hospital, the maker of that plane? "Yet this was the moral law that the professors and leaders and thinkers had wanted to establish all over the earth. If this is what it did in a single small town where we all knew one another, do you care to think what it would do on a world scale? Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to work, when you're tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of the globe? To work - and whenever any man failed anywhere, it's you who would have to make up for it. To work - without any chance to rise, with your meals and your clothes and your home and your pleasure depending on any swindle, any famine, any pestilence anywhere on earth. To work - with no chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through college. To work - on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you'll never see, whose needs you're never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question - just to work and work and work - and leave it up to the Ivys and Geralds of the world to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life? And *this* is the moral law to accept? *THIS* - a moral idea? "Well, we tried it, and we learned. Our agony took four years, from our first meeting to our last, and it ended the only way it could end: in bankruptcy. At our last meeting, Ivy Starnes was the one who tried to brazen it out. She made a short, nasty, snippy little speech in which she said that the plan had failed because the rest of the country had not accepted it, that a single community could not succeed in the midst of a selfish, greedy world - and that the plan was a noble ideal, but that human nature was not good enough for it. A young boy - the one who had been punished for giving us a useful idea in our first year, got up, as we all sat silent, and walked straight to Ivy Starnes on the platform. He said nothing. He spat in her face. That was the end of the noble plan of the Twentieth Century." <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin--Jammer+Oct 29 2003, 05:09 AM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Jammer @ Oct 29 2003, 05:09 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> Since when have other people had the right to tell me what I should and should not try to get for myself. Capitalism says "You want it, work hard and get it." Communism says "You want it? Tough, you need to work for the state so everyone can be equal."
Communism = Slavery to the state. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd--> Here's the problem with Communism in the US right here; everybody is fixated around "having it." What if life was more than just a fixation over having things? Isn't there more to life than that? It isn't a struggle to always attain new things, but that's the way Americans see it, so thats why Communism won't work in America <!--emo&:(--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif'><!--endemo-->
Actually, in a way, if you REALLY wanted something, you could organize everybody to produce 2x the quota; the govt will then have 2x the supply, and you will get 2x back <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo--> Just a thought...
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Here's the problem with Communism in the US right here; everybody is fixated around "having it." What if life was more than just a fixation over having things? Isn't there more to life than that? It isn't a struggle to always attain new things, but that's the way Americans see it, so thats why Communism won't work in America<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
windelkron, i think you're on to something. that is why communism won't work...not just here in the US, but all over the world, everyone sees owning things, property, and wealth to be the be all end all of achievement, until this view is over come, and currently i don't see how it can, communism is a lost cause
Rand isn't really entertaining once you have identified her core philosophy.
In that passage you quoted, she displays a hopelessly materialistic understanding of the alienation which spells Marxism's doom, and her take on explaining its popularity is an insult. Besides, she's much too wordy, and her allegories are childish.
<!--QuoteBegin--Twex+Oct 29 2003, 06:24 AM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Twex @ Oct 29 2003, 06:24 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> Rand isn't really entertaining once you have identified her core philosophy.
In that passage you quoted, she displays a hopelessly materialistic understanding of the alienation which spells Marxism's doom, and her take on explaining its popularity is an insult. Besides, she's much too wordy, and her allegories are childish. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd--> OH I'm sorry, next time I'll describe Marxism exactly as it should be, which will accomplish nothing, except for sating your desire to argue for the sake of arguing.
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Since when have other people had the right to tell me what I should and should not try to get for myself. Capitalism says "You want it, work hard and get it." Communism says "You want it? Tough, you need to work for the state so everyone can be equal."
Communism = Slavery to the state. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The definition of Communism is a stateless society. Also, I have no idea what your point is. Please, clarify.
About Atlas Shrugged:
Well, I figure I could write a book too. It takes place in 17th century England and it's about the capitalist revolution in an English town. It's a very pro-feudalist work, you see.
"Yes, o King, they gave a speech to our town that day, two banker, a merchant, and a craftsman, and they told us that this was the revolution of human spirit against Kingship. We all went along with it, there had been bad harvests, and we kicked out the Priest and the Mayor, who had no small drop of noble blood in him. "They said that we would all compete and make business, and if we did not like it, we were free to seek out employment elsewhere. Well within 4 weeks we were all overcome with greed and killing each other, only half the town was left at the end, when your royal army came in to restore order. So many of us were dead, most of our buildings torched: anyone who made money with business was killed for his money by another "entrepeneur" who usually met the same fate. That is why we have come to London, to beg your forgiveness, and ask for a new noble Mayor and a Priest to rule over our wicked selves. And to deliver you the head of the Banker, who said before his execution that this noble experiment was a good idea, it just didn't work because the rest of England hadn't come along for the "new age." But if your army hadn't come to save us, o King, we'd all be dead."
So you see, this is ****, that's not how capitalism works--capitalism was a huge advancement; likewise, Communism is tagged with a lot of misinterpretations and every one of them comes bass-ackwards out of the woodwork in Ayn Rand's work. The last revolution was misunderstood and made fun of, but it came through in the end.
<b>Twex</b> <!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->the alienation which spells Marxism's doom<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> Alienation? capitalism is the one that is doomed by its alienation: the bourgeoisie relied on the peasants and workers to rise up with it against feudalism, but now that the bourgeoisie are in control they are alienated from their former, misled allies.
Now that the workers are the majority in capitalist countries, Marxism represents <i>identification</i> with the aims of humanity as a whole and <i>not</i> alienation.
Wrong. Anarchism and Communism are two means to an end: the Communist society.
Anarchists do not believe in a party to educate the working class; they believe in the trade unions and in a general-strike across the world that will be victorious.
Because of this outlook, Anarchism has been misguided and suffered defeats in the Paris Commune, in the Spanish Civil war, and in Russia towards the end of WWI.
Before 1871, Communism and Anarchism had been united. (So I guess you could call Marx a bit of an Anarchist until 1871)Communism was formed as a separate political entity, favoring the party, and the state in times of emergency, over the defeat of the Paris Commune which had neither party nor state. A "dictatorship of the proletariat" was said to be necessary in times of trouble.
Because of this outlook, Communism when under attack has had a strong state, but like any state, a greedy one: it survived foreign attacks but was corrupted, so what survived wasn't quite Communism: like in the USSR, and the deformation of the workers' state into a Stalinist bureaucracy.
So what I'm saying is, both the Paris Commune and the USSR were defeats for Anarchism and for Communism as theories.
After the split, Bakunin has been revered as the father of Anarchism, and Marx as the father of Communism.
Lenin later guarded Marx against "Freedom of criticism," or, going against what Marx said but still calling yourself a Marxist, which is what the Social-Democrats did to support their reformism, and their support of WWI.
Stalin went against Lenin when he started contradicting Marx to support his dictatorship and his bureaucracy. The bureaucracy has proven itself to be a means to another end: capitalism.
Trotsky only differed from Marx on ideas about the revolution, on military strategy. He stayed true to Marx politically and economically. Please note that some "Trotskyist" organizations such as the Socialist Workers' Party support Castroism and directly contradict Trotsky on many points. Like Marx, Trotsky is a thinker whose name is often misused by people who would have been his ideological enemies.
So there you have it, an analysis of leftist theories. Now you know...
I wouldnt exactly call anarchism leftist. I do think, however, that communism needs a large central redistribution system (which will per se degenerate into a to talitarian regime), and anarchism does not. So anarchism isnt aiming for the same thing as communism.
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->(which will per se degenerate into a to talitarian regime)<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Anything that has to fend off the entire world is going to, if it does not win, degenerate or be wiped out completely. Like we saw with the Paris Commune's destruction, or the USSR's degeneration. It's win or lose: Communism and Capitalism can not coexist on the same planet; one must fall.
If the centralized state does not have to take emergency measures to prevent its downfall, it will remain democratic. If we win the war, we will not turn into a Stalinist catastophe.
Furthermore, if you think that the USSR was an example of socialist centralized planning, you are wrong. Socialist planning requires the input and consent of the population--the USSR's planning was acted out by and for the bureaucracy.
In conclusion, since you are drawing your "degeneration" statement of historical examples of "Communist nations," for you opt for dictionary.com's 2A definition of Communism, which is what Stalin referred to as socialism (he wasn't bold enough to refer to his corrupt mess as Communism), as opposed to Marx's definition of Communism, I must conclude that you make an alright argument against Stalinism.
but truth be told you haven't said **** about Communism, and I never came here representing Stalinism, so don't direct that **** at me, because we are talking about two different things. Go argue with a stalinist while i wait for someone who knows what communism is.
Comments
You know what I mean <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
How can you make judgements when there have been so few communist countries in the world?
USSR, China, Cuba, NK, Burma. <-- of that list, I can probably cross off two of those (NK and Burma) because they were really totalitarianisms <b>fronting</b> as communisms from the start. The other three, in their early days (China especially), were pretty accurate socialist countries, but by the end forget it. Anyway, the point is that saying that "they never work" based on the first few years of 3 countries is like determining that evolution is impossible by shaking a bottle with a vitamin tablet inside. (But you'll win at the <a href='http://objective.jesussave.us/creationsciencefair.html' target='_blank'>Creation Science Fair</a> :x)
(note, that is a hoax site like landoverbaptist, I think [hope])
And menix...
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->a jacuzzi is a necessity for someone who wants to live with a jacuzzi. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
that's ridiculous!! <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif'><!--endemo-->
It is most certainly not a necessity. I want to have thirty-six beautiful blondes with me in bed this very moment. Is that a desperate wish? oh yeah. Necessity? No.
Having a jacuzzi is a material possession.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That's meaningless. Food is not a necessity for someone who wants to die and a jacuzzi is a necessity for someone who wants to live with a jacuzzi. You can't list everything under these two categories and expect to be treated seriously since necessity depends on situation and material posessions can fulfill necessities. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
You're done, in so many ways, with this topic...
Communism = Slavery to the state.
<b>Atlas Shrugged </b>
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> "Well, there was something that happened at that plant where I worked for twenty years. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they brought a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and everybody - almost everybody - voted for it. We didn't know. We thought it was good. No, that's not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good. The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need. We - what's the matter, ma'am? Why do you look like that?"
"What was the name of the factory?" she asked her voice barely audible.
"The Twentieth Century Motor Company, ma'am, of Starnesville, Wisconsin."
"Go on."
"We voted for that plan at a big meeting, with all of us present, six thousand of us, everybody that worked in the factory. The Starnes heirs made long speeches about it, and it wasn't clear, but nobody asked any questions. None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouth shut - because they made it sound like anyone who'd oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a human being. They told us that the plan would achieve a noble idea. Well, how were we to know otherwise? Hadn't we heard it all our lives - from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every newspaper we ever read and every movie and every public speech? Hadn't we always been told that this was righteous and just? Well, maybe there's some excuse for what we did at that meeting. Still, we voted for the plan - and what we got, we had it coming to us. You know, ma'am, we are marked men, in a way, those of us who lived through the four years of that plan of the Twentieth Century factory. What is it that hell is supposed to be? Evil - plain, naked smirking evil, isn't it? Well, that's what we saw and helped to make - and I think we're damned, every one of us, and maybe we'll never be forgiven...
"Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people? Try pouring water into a tank where there's a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you can pour, and each bucket you bring breaks the pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours per week, then forty-eight, then fifty-six - for your neighbor’s supper, for his wife's operation - for his child's measles - for his mother's wheel chair - for his uncle's shirt - for his nephew's schooling - for the baby next door - for the baby to be born - for anyone anywhere around you - it's theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures - and yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month, year after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hope, without end.... From each according to his ability, to each according to his need....
"We're all one big family, they told us, we're all in this together. But you don't all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day - together, and you don’t all get a bellyache - together. What's whose ability and which of whose needs come first? When it's all in one pot, you can't let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht - and if his feeling is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it's not right for me to own a car until I've worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth - why can't he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability and have not collapsed? No? He can't? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he's replastered his living room? Oh well... Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We *voted* on it. Yes ma'am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars - rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn't belong to him, it belonged to 'the family,' and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his 'need' - so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife's head colds, hoping that 'the family' would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because its miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm - so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that *his* need was worse than his brother's. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?
"But that wasn't all. There was also something else that we discovered at the same meeting. The factory's production had fallen by forty per cent, in that first half-year, so it was decided that somebody hadn't delivered 'according to his ability.' Who? How would you tell it? 'The family' voted on that, too. They voted which men were the best, and these men were sentenced to work overtime each night for the next six months. Overtime without pay - because you weren't paid by time and you weren't paid by work, only by need.
"Do I have to tell you what happened after that - and into what sort of creatures we all started turning, we who had once been human? We began to hide whatever ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we never worked any faster or better than the next fellow. What else could we do, when we knew that if we did our best for 'the family,' it's not thanks or rewards that we'd get, but punishment? We knew that for every stinker who'd ruin a batch of motors and cost the company money - either through is sloppiness, because he didn't have to care, or through plain incompetence - it's we who'd have to pa with our nights and our Sundays. So we did our best to be no good.
"There was one young boy who started out, full of fire for the noble ideal, a bright kid without any schooling, but with a wonderful head on his shoulders. The first year, he figured out a work process that saved us thousands of man-hours. He gave it to 'the family,' didn't ask anything for it either, couldn't ask, but that was alright with him. It was for the ideal, he said. But when he found himself voted as one of our ablest and sentenced to night work because we hadn't got enough from him, he shut his mouth and his brain. You can bet he didn't come up with any ideas, the second year.
"What was it they always told us about the vicious competition of the profit system, where men had to compete for who'd do a better job than his fellows? Vicious, wasn't it? Well, they should have seen what it was like when we all had to compete one another for who'd do the worst job possible. There's no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at *not* doing his best, were he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day. That will finish him quicker than drink or idleness or pulling stick-ups for a living. But there was nothing else for us to do except to fake unfitness. The one accusation we feared was to be suspected of ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay off. And what was there to work for? You knew that your basic pittance would be given to you anyway, whether you worked or not - your 'housing and feeding allowance,' it was called - and above that pittance, you had no chance to get anything, no matter how hard you tried. You couldn't count on buying a new suit of clothes next year - they might give you a 'clothing allowance' or they might not, according to whether nobody broke a leg, needed an operation or gave birth to more babies. And if there wasn't enough money for new suits for everybody, then you couldn't get yours, either.
"There was one man who worked hard all his life, because he always wanted to send his son through college. Well, the boy graduated from high school in the second year of the plan, but 'the family' wouldn't give the father any 'allowance' for the college. They said his son couldn't go to college, until we had enough to send everybody's sons to college - and that we first had to send everybody's children through high school, and we didn't even have enough for that. The father died the following year, in a knife fight with somebody in a saloon, a fight over nothing in particular - such fights were beginning to happen among us all the time.
"Then there was an old guy, a widower with no family, who had one hobby: phonograph records. I guess that was all he ever got out of life. In the old days, he used to skip meals just to buy himself some new recording of classical music. Well, they didn't give him any 'allowance' for records - 'personal luxury,' they called it. But at that same meeting, Millie Bush, somebody's daughter, a mean, ugly little eight year-old, was voted a pair of gold braces for her buck teeth - this was 'medical need,' because the staff psychologist had said that the poor girl would get an inferiority complex if her teeth weren't straightened out. The old guy who loved music, turned to drink instead. He got so you never saw him fully conscious anymore. But it seems there was one thing he couldn't forget. One night, he came staggering down the street, saw Millie Bush, swung his fist and knocked all her teeth out. Every one of them.
"Drink, of course, was what we all turned to, some more, some less. Don't ask how we got the money for it. When all the decent pleasures are forbidden, there's always ways to get the rotten ones. You don't break into grocery stores after dark and you don't pick your fellow's pockets to buy classical symphonies or fishing tackle, but if it’s to get stinking drunk and forget - you do. Fishing tackle? Hunting guns? Snapshot cameras? Hobbies? There wasn't any 'amusement allowance' for anybody. 'Amusement' was the first thing they dropped. Aren't you always supposed to be ashamed to object when anybody asks you to give anything up, if it’s something that gave you pleasure? Even our 'tobacco allowance' was cut to where we got two packs of cigarettes a month - and this, they told us, was because the money had to go into the babies' milk fund. Babies was the only item of production that didn't fall, but rose and kept on rising - because people had nothing else to do, I guess, and because they didn't have to care, the baby wasn't their burden, it was 'the family's'. In fact, the best chance you had of getting a raise and breathing easier for a while was a 'baby allowance.' Either that, or a major disease.
"It didn't take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to play it straight had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel's worth of tobacco or chew a stick of gum, worrying whether somebody had more need for that nickel. He felt ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed, wondering whose weary nights of overtime had paid for it, knowing that his food was not his by right, miserably wishing to be cheated rather than to cheat, to be a sucker, but not a blood-sucker. He wouldn't marry, he wouldn't help his folks back home, he wouldn't put an extra burden on 'the family.' Besides, if he still had some sort of sense of responsibility, he couldn't marry or bring children into the world, when he could plan nothing, promise nothing, count on nothing. But the shiftless and the irresponsible had a field day of it. They bred babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra 'disability allowance,' they got more sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture, their homes - what the hell, 'the family' was paying for it! They found more ways of getting in 'need' than the rest of us could ever imagine - they developed a skill for it, which was the only ability *they* showed.
"God help us, ma'am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we'd been given a law to live by, a *moral* law, they called it, which punished those who observed it - for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man's dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness? We were a pretty decent bunch of fellows when we started. There weren't many chiselers among us. We knew our jobs as were proud of it and we worked for the best factory in the country, where old man Starnes hired nothing but the pick of the country's labor. Within one year under the new plan, there wasn't an honest man left among us. *That* was the evil, the sort of hell-horror evil that preachers used to scare you with, but you never thought to see alive. Not that the plan encouraged a few ****, but that it turned decent people into ****, and there was nothing else it could do - and it was called a moral ideal!
"What was it we were supposed to want to work for? For the love of our brothers? What brothers? For the bums, the loafers, the moochers we saw all around us? And whether they were cheating or plain incompetent, whether they were unwilling or unable - what difference did that make to us? If we were tied for life to the level of their unfitness, faked or real, how long could we care to go on? We had no way of knowing their ability, we had no way of controlling their needs - all we knew was that we were beasts of burden struggling blindly in some sort of place that was half-hospital, half-stockyards - a place geared to nothing but disability, disaster, disease - beasts put there for the relief of whatever whoever chose to say was whichever's need.
"Love of our brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man's new shirt, for another's wife's hat, for an outing with their family, for a paint job on their house - it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations, our denials, our hunger. We began to spy on one another, each hoping to catch the others lying about their needs, so as to cut their 'allowance' at the next meeting. We began to have stool pigeons who informed on people, who reported that someone bootlegged a turkey to his family on some Sunday - which he'd paid for by gambling, most likely. We began to meddle into one another's lives. We provoked family quarrels, to get somebody's relatives thrown out. Any time we saw a man starting to go steady with a girl, we made life miserable for him. We broke up many engagements. We didn't want anyone to marry, we didn't want any more dependents to feed.
"In the old days, we used to celebrate if someone had a baby, we used to chip in and help out with the hospital bills, if he happened to be hard-pressed for the moment. Now, if a baby was born, we didn't speak to the parents for weeks. Babies, to us, had become what locusts were to farmers. In the old day, we used to help a man if he had a bad illness in the family. Now - well, I'll tell you about one case. It was the mother of a man who had been with us for fifteen years. She was a kindly old lady, cheerful and wise, she knew all of us by our first names and we all liked her - we used to like her. One day, she slipped on the cellar stairs and fell and broke her hip. We knew what that meant at that age. The staff doctor said that she have to be sent to a hospital in town, for expensive treatments that would take a long time. The old lady died the night before she was to leave for town. They never established the cause of death. No, I don't know whether she was murdered. Nobody said that. Nobody would talk about it at all. All I know is that I - and that's what I can't forget! - I, too, had caught myself wishing that she would die. This - may God forgive us! - was the brotherhood, the security, the abundance that the plan was supposed to achieve for us!
"Was there any reason why this sort of horror would ever be preached by anybody? Was there anybody who got any profit from it? There was. The Starnes heirs. I hope you are not going to remind me that they sacrificed a fortune and turned the factory over to us as a gift. We were fooled by that one, too. Yes, they gave up the factory. But profit, ma'am, depends on what it is you're after. And what the Starnes heirs were after, no money on earth could buy. Money is too clean and innocent for that.
"Eric Starnes, the youngest - he was a jellyfish that didn't have the guts to be anything in particular. He got himself voted as the Director of our Public Relations Department, which didn't do anything, except that he had a staff for the not doing of anything, so he didn't have to bother sticking around the office. The pay he got - well, I shouldn't call it 'pay,' none of us was 'paid' - the alms voted to him was fairly modest, about ten times what I got, but that wasn't riches. Eric didn't care for money - he wouldn't have known what to do with it. He spent his time hanging around among us, showing how chummy he was and democratic. He wanted to be loved, it seems. The way he went about it was to keep reminding us that he had given us the factory. We couldn't stand him.
"Gerald Starnes was our Director of Production. We never learned just what the size of his rake-off - his alms - had been. It would have taken a staff of accountants to figure that out, and a staff of engineers to trace the way it was piped, directly or indirectly, into his office. None of it was supposed to be for him - it was all company expenses. Gerald had three cars, four secretaries, five telephones, and he used to throw champagne and caviar parties that no tax-paying tycoon in the country could have afforded. He spent more money in one year than his father had earned in profits in the last two years of his life. We saw a hundred-pound stack - a hundred pounds, we weighed them - of magazines in Gerald's office, full of stories about our factory and our noble plan, with big pictures of Gerald Starnes, calling him a great social crusader. Gerald liked to come into the shops at night, dressed in his formal clothes, flashing diamond cufflinks the size of a nickel and shaking cigar ashes all over. Any cheap show-off who's got nothing to parade about but his cash, is bad enough – except that he makes no bones about the cash being his, and you're free to gape at him or not, as you wish, and mostly don't. But when a **** like Gerald Starnes puts on an act and keeps spouting that he doesn't care for material wealth, that he's only serving 'the family,' that all the lushness is not for himself, but for our sake and for the common good, because it's necessary to keep to the prestige of the company and of the noble plan in the eyes of the public - then that's when you learn to hate the creature as you've never hated anything human.
"But his sister Ivy was worse. She really did not care for material wealth. The alms she got were no bigger than ours, and she went about in scuffed flat-heeled shoes and shirtwaists - just to show how selfless she was. She was our Director of Distribution. She was the lady in charge of our needs. Of course, distribution was supposed to be decided by voting - by the voice of the people. But when the people are six-thousand howling voices, trying to decide without yardstick, rhyme or reason, where there are no rules to the game and each can demand anything, but has the right to nothing, when everybody holds power over everybody's life except his own - then it turns out, as it did, that the voice of the people is Ivy Starnes. By the end of the second year, we dropped the pretense of the 'family meetings' - in the name of 'production efficiency and time economy,' one meeting used to take ten days - all the petitions of need were simply sent to Miss Starnes' office. No, not sent. They had to be recited to her in person by every petitioner. Then she made up a distribution list, which she read to us for our vote of approval. There was a ten-minute period on the agenda for discussion and objections. We made no objections, we knew better by that time. Nobody can divide a factory's income among thousands of people, without some sort of gauge to measure people's value. Her gauge was bootlicking. Selfless? In her father's time, all of his money wouldn't have given him a chance to speak to his lousiest wiper and get away with it, as she spoke to our best skilled workers and their wives. She had pale eyes that looked fishy, cold and dead. And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who’d talked back to her once and who'd just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who's ever preached the slogan: 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.'
"This was the whole secret of it. At first I kept wondering how it could be possible that the educated, the cultured, the famous men of the world could make a mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort of abomination - when five minutes of thought should have told them what would happen if somebody tried to practice what they preached. Now I know that they didn't do it by any mistake. Mistakes of this size are never made innocently. If some men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they have no may to make it work and no possible reason to explain their choice - it's because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell. And we weren't so innocent either, when we voted for that plan at the first meeting. We didn't do it just because we believed the drippy old guff they spewed was good. We had another reason, but the guff helped us hide it from our neighbors and from ourselves. The guff gave us a chance to pass off as virtues something that we'd be ashamed to admit otherwise. There wasn't a man voting for it who didn't think that under a setup of this kind he'd muscle in on the profits of the men abler than himself. There wasn't a man rich enough or smart enough but that he didn't think that somebody was richer and smarter, and this plan would give him a share of his better's wealth and brain. But while he was thinking that he'd get unearned benefits from the men above, he forgot about the men below who'd get unearned benefits, too. He forgot about all his inferiors who'd rush to drain him just as he hoped to drain his superiors. The worker who liked the idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss's, forgot that ever body and beggar on earth would come howling that *their* need entitled them to an icebox like his own. *That* was our real motive when we voted - that was the truth of it - but we didn't like to think it, so the less we liked it, the louder we yelled about our love for the common good.
"Well, we got what we asked for. By the time we saw what it was that we'd asked for, it was too late. We were trapped, with no place to go. The best men among us left the factory in the first week of the plan. We lost our best engineers, superintendents, foremen and highest-skilled workers. A man of self-respect doesn't turn into a milk cow for anybody. Some able fellows tried to stick it out, but they couldn't take it for long. We kept losing our men, they kept escaping from the factory like a pesthole - till we had nothing left except the men of need, but none of the men of ability.
"And the few of us who were still any good, but stayed on, were only those who had been there too long. In the old days, nobody ever quit the Twentieth Century - and, somehow, we couldn't make ourselves believe that it was gone. After a while, we couldn't quit, because no other employer would have us - for which I can't blame him. Nobody would deal with us in any way, no respectable person or firm. All the small shops, where we traded, started moving out of Starnesville fast, till we had nothing left but saloons, gambling joints and crooks who sold us trash at gouging prices. The alms we got kept falling, but the cost of our living kept rising. The list of the factory's needy kept stretching, but the list of customers shrank. There was less and less income to divide among more and more people. In the old days, it used to be said that the Twentieth Century Motor trademark was as good as the karat mark on gold. I don't know what it was that the Starnes heirs thought, if they thought at all, but I supposed that like all social planners and like savages, they thought this trademark was a magic stamp which did the trick by some sort of voodoo power and that it would keep them rich, as it had kept their father. Well, when our customers began to see that we never delivered an order on time and never put out a motor that didn't have something wrong with it – the magic stamp began to work the other way around: people wouldn't take a motor as a gift, if it was marked Twentieth Century. And it came to where our only customers were men who never paid and never meant to pay their bills. But Gerald Starnes, doped by his own publicity, got huffy and went around, with an air of moral superiority, demanding that businessmen place orders with us, not because out motors were good, but because we *needed* the orders so badly.
"By that time, a village half-wit could see what generations of professors had pretended not to notice. What good would our need do to a power plant when its generator stopped because of our defective engines? What good would it do a man caught on an operating table when the electric light went out? What good would it do the passengers of a plane when its motor failed in mid-air? And if they bought our product, not because of its merit, but because of our need, what would be the good, the right, the moral thing to do for the owner of that power plant, the surgeon in that hospital, the maker of that plane?
"Yet this was the moral law that the professors and leaders and thinkers had wanted to establish all over the earth. If this is what it did in a single small town where we all knew one another, do you care to think what it would do on a world scale? Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to work, when you're tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of the globe? To work - and whenever any man failed anywhere, it's you who would have to make up for it. To work - without any chance to rise, with your meals and your clothes and your home and your pleasure depending on any swindle, any famine, any pestilence anywhere on earth. To work - with no chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through college. To work - on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you'll never see, whose needs you're never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question - just to work and work and work - and leave it up to the Ivys and Geralds of the world to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life? And *this* is the moral law to accept? *THIS* - a moral idea?
"Well, we tried it, and we learned. Our agony took four years, from our first meeting to our last, and it ended the only way it could end: in bankruptcy. At our last meeting, Ivy Starnes was the one who tried to brazen it out. She made a short, nasty, snippy little speech in which she said that the plan had failed because the rest of the country had not accepted it, that a single community could not succeed in the midst of a selfish, greedy world - and that the plan was a noble ideal, but that human nature was not good enough for it. A young boy - the one who had been punished for giving us a useful idea in our first year, got up, as we all sat silent, and walked straight to Ivy Starnes on the platform. He said nothing. He spat in her face. That was the end of the noble plan of the Twentieth Century." <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Communism = Slavery to the state. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Here's the problem with Communism in the US right here; everybody is fixated around "having it." What if life was more than just a fixation over having things? Isn't there more to life than that? It isn't a struggle to always attain new things, but that's the way Americans see it, so thats why Communism won't work in America <!--emo&:(--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif'><!--endemo-->
Actually, in a way, if you REALLY wanted something, you could organize everybody to produce 2x the quota; the govt will then have 2x the supply, and you will get 2x back <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo--> Just a thought...
windelkron, i think you're on to something. that is why communism won't work...not just here in the US, but all over the world, everyone sees owning things, property, and wealth to be the be all end all of achievement, until this view is over come, and currently i don't see how it can, communism is a lost cause
In that passage you quoted, she displays a hopelessly materialistic understanding of the alienation which spells Marxism's doom, and her take on explaining its popularity is an insult. Besides, she's much too wordy, and her allegories are childish.
In that passage you quoted, she displays a hopelessly materialistic understanding of the alienation which spells Marxism's doom, and her take on explaining its popularity is an insult. Besides, she's much too wordy, and her allegories are childish. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
OH I'm sorry, next time I'll describe Marxism exactly as it should be, which will accomplish nothing, except for sating your desire to argue for the sake of arguing.
Way to completely miss the point.
Communism = Slavery to the state.
<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The definition of Communism is a stateless society. Also, I have no idea what your point is. Please, clarify.
About Atlas Shrugged:
Well, I figure I could write a book too. It takes place in 17th century England and it's about the capitalist revolution in an English town. It's a very pro-feudalist work, you see.
"Yes, o King, they gave a speech to our town that day, two banker, a merchant, and a craftsman, and they told us that this was the revolution of human spirit against Kingship. We all went along with it, there had been bad harvests, and we kicked out the Priest and the Mayor, who had no small drop of noble blood in him.
"They said that we would all compete and make business, and if we did not like it, we were free to seek out employment elsewhere. Well within 4 weeks we were all overcome with greed and killing each other, only half the town was left at the end, when your royal army came in to restore order. So many of us were dead, most of our buildings torched: anyone who made money with business was killed for his money by another "entrepeneur" who usually met the same fate. That is why we have come to London, to beg your forgiveness, and ask for a new noble Mayor and a Priest to rule over our wicked selves. And to deliver you the head of the Banker, who said before his execution that this noble experiment was a good idea, it just didn't work because the rest of England hadn't come along for the "new age." But if your army hadn't come to save us, o King, we'd all be dead."
So you see, this is ****, that's not how capitalism works--capitalism was a huge advancement; likewise, Communism is tagged with a lot of misinterpretations and every one of them comes bass-ackwards out of the woodwork in Ayn Rand's work. The last revolution was misunderstood and made fun of, but it came through in the end.
<b>Twex</b>
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->the alienation which spells Marxism's doom<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Alienation? capitalism is the one that is doomed by its alienation: the bourgeoisie relied on the peasants and workers to rise up with it against feudalism, but now that the bourgeoisie are in control they are alienated from their former, misled allies.
Now that the workers are the majority in capitalist countries, Marxism represents <i>identification</i> with the aims of humanity as a whole and <i>not</i> alienation.
Anarchists do not believe in a party to educate the working class; they believe in the trade unions and in a general-strike across the world that will be victorious.
Because of this outlook, Anarchism has been misguided and suffered defeats in the Paris Commune, in the Spanish Civil war, and in Russia towards the end of WWI.
Before 1871, Communism and Anarchism had been united. (So I guess you could call Marx a bit of an Anarchist until 1871)Communism was formed as a separate political entity, favoring the party, and the state in times of emergency, over the defeat of the Paris Commune which had neither party nor state. A "dictatorship of the proletariat" was said to be necessary in times of trouble.
Because of this outlook, Communism when under attack has had a strong state, but like any state, a greedy one: it survived foreign attacks but was corrupted, so what survived wasn't quite Communism: like in the USSR, and the deformation of the workers' state into a Stalinist bureaucracy.
So what I'm saying is, both the Paris Commune and the USSR were defeats for Anarchism and for Communism as theories.
After the split, Bakunin has been revered as the father of Anarchism, and Marx as the father of Communism.
Lenin later guarded Marx against "Freedom of criticism," or, going against what Marx said but still calling yourself a Marxist, which is what the Social-Democrats did to support their reformism, and their support of WWI.
Stalin went against Lenin when he started contradicting Marx to support his dictatorship and his bureaucracy. The bureaucracy has proven itself to be a means to another end: capitalism.
Trotsky only differed from Marx on ideas about the revolution, on military strategy. He stayed true to Marx politically and economically. Please note that some "Trotskyist" organizations such as the Socialist Workers' Party support Castroism and directly contradict Trotsky on many points. Like Marx, Trotsky is a thinker whose name is often misused by people who would have been his ideological enemies.
So there you have it, an analysis of leftist theories. Now you know...
what the hell?
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->(which will per se degenerate into a to talitarian regime)<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Anything that has to fend off the entire world is going to, if it does not win, degenerate or be wiped out completely. Like we saw with the Paris Commune's destruction, or the USSR's degeneration. It's win or lose: Communism and Capitalism can not coexist on the same planet; one must fall.
If the centralized state does not have to take emergency measures to prevent its downfall, it will remain democratic. If we win the war, we will not turn into a Stalinist catastophe.
Furthermore, if you think that the USSR was an example of socialist centralized planning, you are wrong. Socialist planning requires the input and consent of the population--the USSR's planning was acted out by and for the bureaucracy.
In conclusion, since you are drawing your "degeneration" statement of historical examples of "Communist nations," for you opt for dictionary.com's 2A definition of Communism, which is what Stalin referred to as socialism (he wasn't bold enough to refer to his corrupt mess as Communism), as opposed to Marx's definition of Communism, I must conclude that you make an alright argument against Stalinism.
but truth be told you haven't said **** about Communism, and I never came here representing Stalinism, so don't direct that **** at me, because we are talking about two different things. Go argue with a stalinist while i wait for someone who knows what communism is.