the boogeyman of Marxism/communism...

[Iwannaplato]

Did Kropotkin die again?!?

Such antics!

He's told me that he's not primarily here for dialogue. He does respond, but he's mainly in sharing his thoughts mode. So, I wouldn't read much into the specific disappearances - which sometimes are caused by work, he says, and then also by his main intention - but perhaps one can read much into the general pattern.

[Immanuel Can]

Did Kropotkin die again?!?

Such antics!

He's told me that he's not primarily here for dialogue.

Ummm... What does one say to a claim like that? "I'm not here to talk with you, I'm just here to talk at you"?

[Iwannaplato]

Did Kropotkin die again?!?

Such antics!

He's told me that he's not primarily here for dialogue.

Ummm... What does one say to a claim like that? "I'm not here to talk with you, I'm just here to talk at you"?

Ironically, since he said that - or something close to that - he's responded much more to people.
I did suggest this was a forum and not a blog. But then, one can do what one wants here. People often consider the right to be able to do something with a moral defense.

[Peter Kropotkin]

I will leave the amateur psychologists to wonder among
themselves about Kropotkin.. I have better things to do...

and to reestablish what I was going to say before I was forced
to leave for a while...

let us return to Marx and his times... what was the "problem''
facing Marx in his times? the basic problem was population...
that London went from 750,000 in 1780 to 1.4 million 1815,
to 3 million plus in 1860 to 6 and half million in 1900....
and with the massively increased population came an increase
poverty of the kind that we cannot grasp today.. and a great
deal of the poverty and despair came from the massive factories
that were set during the Industrial revolution...

that the system was designed to destroy and dehumanize people
was quite clear to anyone who cared to look, and Marx did look...
that there were such a thing as capitalist was obvious to all..
Men who owned great factories and made millions on the backs
of virtual slaves.. as it is true today, it was true then,
there are no other options to the capitalistic system.. and to
oppose the dominant system of capitalism was to die poverty
stricken in the streets...as thousands did....every day....

and to Marx, what was the possible solution to the great crisis?

and we arrive at the second point.... the nature of human beings....
capitalism is built on a lie... that private vices makes public good...
and it is never exactly explained how this work's...
take for example, we have (to keep the number workable)
10 people... and each of them have a vice... one is a gambler
and one is a rapist and one is a terrorist and one is a murderer,
and one is an alcoholic.. well, you get the picture.. we have
10 people with vices.. how do those ten people with their vices,
create a public good?:

now one might say, but they are actually working on one vice..
the pursuit of money... hence the point of business.... but knowing
people, the pursuit of money is not the only vice.. money is used
to obtain the other vices.. gambling, drugs, hookers, drinking...
are all vices that requires money to engage in that vice....
so people will often work to gain the money for their vice...
and this pursuit of money for vices creates chaos and disorder
within a company.... I have, over the years, worked for many
companies, and I can tell you that they are usually one small
step from complete disorder.. the need to seek out vices, especially
in terms of money, quite often creates chaos and disorder within
a company...an individual or a couple of individuals will
happily destroy a company if they think they can make some money
off of it.. they will have no problem screwing everyone in sight
if it means they personally will make some money... and that vice
has led to much chaos and disorder within companies...see,
Wells Fargo for instances of that... so there is no
scenario that allows for public good to come out of private vices....

and now we hit the third point... that man/human beings are naturally
greedy... is false.... our behavior is learned from others...
there is no natural behavior in human beings... in other words,
we are not born being greedy or nice or happy or kind,
nor are we born prejudice or superstitious or bigoted...

all human behavior is taught to us... by family, schooling/education,
media, the church... behavior is learned, all of it... see a child
being rude or an adult being mean, that is learned behavior
from someone.... for as Locke said that Tabula rasa was the
theory that at birth the (human) mind was a ''blank slate"
without rules for processing data, and that data is added
and rules for processing are formed solely by one's sensory
experiences.... and we can, by the act of experiences,
train someone to be mean or kind or considerate or
greedy or cruel... our experience with children create
their slate and create who they are....to say children
are naturally greedy is flat out wrong.... we have trained
by experience to be greedy.. we reward those children who
engage in greedy behavior and punish those children who
refuse to be greedy... it is done by families, education,
the media, the society at large...

now we have the theories needed to understand the problem
of Marx.... one, we have massive growth of population that.
is poverty stricken.. two, we have private vices somehow,
no one knows how, but somehow private vices are supposed
to create public good and three, we have the wrong idea
about how we become greedy or kind or cruel or nice...
they are learned.. by the experience given to us by the family,
the state, the media, education, and the society at large...

we are told from birth that we must be winners....
that only the winners are rewarded, the losers are just
that, losers....and to be a winner in a capitalistic society,
the winner has the will to make money.. and the one who
makes the most money wins.... in America that is taught into
us from the day we are born... which is why we can't see
any other possibilities...the only possibilities offered to us
is to engage in private vices like greed which is supported
by the bogus idea that somehow this private greed will
result in the public good....

so what does Marx think?

he starts with certain idea that are provable in life....
one, that we are social creatures.. that we can only succeed
with the help of others... there is nothing in life that we
can do or succeed at without the help of others...
we cannot build it ourselves...from meeting our bodily needs
of food, water, shelter, education, health care... to our
psychological needs of love, a sense of belonging, of safety
and security, to esteem... all of these requires others to achieve...
we are dependent on others and others are dependent on us...
that is biology 101... to make a system that doesn't engage in that
fact is a system doomed to failure... ah, like capitalism...

that every single person is dependent on others.. and
so, we have communism in which every single person is dependent on
everyone else... as it is in life...

the next point is that we have learned to be greedy.. engage
in private vices that don't benefit the state or society at large...
we are taught to take care of ourselves before others..
but what if that order is wrong... what if we take care of others
before ourselves? then those cynics might say, but someone
will take advantage of us.... the universal cry of the cynic
hoping that someone won't take advantage of them.....
seriously, is that the worse you can think of happening?
someone might "take advantage of you?.''
to spend my life worrying if someone MIGHT take
advantage of me? and what if they do? what is the worse that
can happen? I might die.....given that you are living your life
in fear, death may be a step up for you......
I am not so weak and fearful that I must win every single
exchange I engage with... I will often let another win
and why? I can afford it... I am not so small that I might
let one loss destroy me..... I am strong and I can take whatever
losses life can toss at me...the person is who is deathly afraid
of someone MIGHT take advantage of them, is so living in fear,
I am not really sure why they are still living.. to be in so much
fear... that is not a way to live....

and this is the basis of communism... that we need each other,
that private good creates public good... that we can learn
to be honest, trusting, not greedy, to survive loss... we
can learn from experience, the experience of a society
that believes in the power of love and trust and benevolence
and generosity.... (I not that in looking at a thesaurus, that
there are dozens of words for greed, but only 6 for an antonym for
greed... and only two of them really work)

you want an ideal society, an ideal state.. we can build it..
if, if we are ready to become teachers of the next generation..
and teach them the path to goodness... by teaching children
love and trust and generosity instead of greed, hate, bigotry,
as we teach them today.....

and that is the point of communism... to be the change that
we want to see... which is to remove greed and hate
and prejudice and bigotry from the world... and we begin
with ourselves and then we teach the world and then
we change the systems, the ism's of the world to reflect
the new beliefs of being human....

it does take a village... by working together to reach
common achievable goals, we can, together, build a new
world..

Kropotkin

[Immanuel Can]

... by working together to reach
common achievable goals, we can, together, build a new
world..

People like you cause corpses.

And nobody in human history has caused more than Marxists have.

[Peter Kropotkin]

... by working together to reach
common achievable goals, we can, together, build a new
world..

People like you cause corpses.

And nobody in human history has caused more than Marxists have.

K: religion has caused more deaths than Marxism...
.... and by the way, excellent job rebutting my points...
if all you got is insults, run with them...

Kropotkin

[Iwannaplato]

K: religion has caused more deaths than Marxism...

Religion's been around much longer. I think the deaths caused by marxist regimes in the time since we've had Marxism would give Marxism a big edge over religions in the killing category.

[Iwannaplato]

I will leave the amateur psychologists to wonder among
themselves about Kropotkin.. I have better things to do...

Understandible....but you are also leaving on-point issues unaddressed....
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[Immanuel Can]

... by working together to reach
common achievable goals, we can, together, build a new
world..

People like you cause corpses.

And nobody in human history has caused more than Marxists have.

K: religion has caused more deaths than Marxism...

Sooo laughably, statistically wrong. A dead lie.

By the most generous reckoning, religious strife is responsible for not more than about 7.5% of history's war dead. (Based on secular sources like the Encyclopedia of War) Half of that was done by the centuries of Muslim crusades; the other half, around 3.8%, was all religions in history combined -- the Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Catholics, Mormons and various tribal and polytheist groups included. And some groups, like the Quakers, Hassidim and Anabaptists have a total of 0%. They never killed a single person.

By contrast, Marxist regimes have killed (if we are kind with our estimates) at least 100 million, orders of magnitude more than anybody else. They have the gulags, the re-education camps, the death marches, the killing fields, the proxy-murders of the Cold War...and on, and on, and on. We don't even know how many MORE than that total they've killed...we just know it's not less.

There's nothing in history, no single cause at all, that's anywhere near so murderous as Marxism. And there's not one case in the history of the world in which Marxism has produced anything else but corpses, misery and economic collapse. That's verifiable, even today. Try living in Cuba or Venezuela right now.

So you're talking rot. And there's your proof...so much of it you could drown in it, if corpses were an ocean.

[phyllo]

Apples and oranges.

What's 7.5% expressed as a quantity of death people?

And are war deaths the only ones that can be attributed to religion? Probably not.

[Peter Kropotkin]

People like you cause corpses.

And nobody in human history has caused more than Marxists have.

K: religion has caused more deaths than Marxism...

Sooo laughably, statistically wrong. A dead lie.

By the most generous reckoning, religious strife is responsible for not more than about 7.5% of history's war dead. (Based on secular sources like the Encyclopedia of War) Half of that was done by the centuries of Muslim crusades; the other half, around 3.8%, was all religions in history combined -- the Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Catholics, Mormons and various tribal and polytheist groups included. And some groups, like the Quakers, Hassidim and Anabaptists have a total of 0%. They never killed a single person.

By contrast, Marxist regimes have killed (if we are kind with our estimates) at least 100 million, orders of magnitude more than anybody else. They have the gulags, the re-education camps, the death marches, the killing fields, the proxy-murders of the Cold War...and on, and on, and on. We don't even know how many MORE than that total they've killed...we just know it's not less.

There's nothing in history, no single cause at all, that's anywhere near so murderous as Marxism. And there's not one case in the history of the world in which Marxism has produced anything else but corpses, misery and economic collapse. That's verifiable, even today. Try living in Cuba or Venezuela right now.

So you're talking rot. And there's your proof...so much of it you could drown in it, if corpses were an ocean.

K: and once again, you have to be careful about what you are talking about...
you said "Marxist" and the fact is that the Soviet Union was not Marxists,
(read Marx and find me the term, "a 5 year plan", you won't)
what the Soviet Union was, at first, Leninism, and then it
change to Stalinism, neither has anything to do with what Marx wrote..
they weren't Marxist regimes.. they were Leninism/Stalinism...
and Mao, had very little to do with what Marx wrote...Maoism
isn't Marxist either, the fact is that Marxism, as written by Marx,
has never been tried... what Marx had in mind, was closer
to a labor union, then what the Soviet Union or China created...

and as far as religions causing deaths, think about it,
religious fighting has killed millions of people over
thousands of years....the Christian fighting the Muslims over
these last thousand years, the Catholic fighting the Protestants
for over 200 years, the Holocaust of WW 2 was a war against
the Jews, where 6 million Jews died...the persecution of one
religious group against another religious group is a war
against a religious group... and that is happening today...
the right wing war against gays, trans, education, against
anyone who isn't the exact same model of the right wing person....
and need I remind you of the "Culture Wars" of the last 40 years
or perhaps the "war on drugs" also over the last 40 years.. and both
failed in their purpose, and have destroyed lives... and both
are religious wars... driven by the same religious people to
"purify" the nation into a religious nation/state......

if asked, I would name religion as one of the greatest threats
we have to humanity...of course, after capitalism...

Kropotkin

[Immanuel Can]

...the Soviet Union was not Marxists...

Wait: I'll call them up and tell them. They'll be sooo surprised.

Let's cut to the chase Kropotkin: WHERE has real Marxism existed?

If it hasn't, why hasn't it, and who could make it work?

If it has, which of its many human-rights and economic disasters do you want to own up to?

[phyllo]

If it hasn't, why hasn't it, and who could make it work?

We have to keep trying to create 'real' Marxism until we get it right.

No matter how many bodies need to be buried in the process.

[Peter Kropotkin]

...the Soviet Union was not Marxists...

Wait: I'll call them up and tell them. They'll be sooo surprised.

Let's cut to the chase Kropotkin: WHERE has real Marxism existed?

If it hasn't, why hasn't it, and who could make it work?

If it has, which of its many human-rights and economic disasters do you want to own up to?

K: it hasn't been practiced.. as I mentioned, we have Leninism and Stalinism
and Maoism, but not Marxism.... and as far as my "own up to"
I am not a COMMUNIST nor am I a Marxist... I have argued
against these two ideals since day one.. and in fact, have argued
against it, in another post today... just because I argue against
capitalism doesn't make me a Marxist nor a Communist..
I am waiting for the right economic system to come along...
but it ain't capitalism nor is it communism... but perhaps,
perhaps it is Marxism as practiced by Marx.. and never tried...

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

I am hoping in the next day or so, to create an "communism"
thread in which I lay out my vast disagreements with communism/
Stalinism, Leninism, Maoism...my disagreements with these
"ism's" is almost as substantial as my disagreement with capitalism...

Kropotkin