[quote=meadandale]Communism brought us Chernobyl…so what’s your point? That massive government is the solution to preventing disasters? Seriously?[/quote]
First of all, Any social system that does not have an updating and integrated knowledge of our physical systems to make decisions on is irrelevant. So that includes all of our isms.
What Marx did is accurately critique capitalism
Second, Russia was never communism. It would be more accurately described as state capitalism. Even Lenin admitted said this in later years.
Capitalism is a social system which capital is the “social relation” between people and the means of production. There has not been modern state or empire that does not use capital as a social relation. It’s called CAPITALism not PRIVATism for a reason.
The beginnings of capitalism in feudal Europe was very similar to the beginnings of Stalinist Russia. Though, in Russia it was much more brutal because it was done in such a short time span.
The means of subsistence production (especially primary production per the physiocrats’ definition: agriculture) were taken away from people en masse (enclosed) not too long ago see “enclosures” in england circa 1300-1700. People suddenly did not have the same type of access to the land that they’d always had. Someone else owned it in a totally different way than the feudal way. The merchant class — those who produce nothing, but simply rearrange and sell what nature produces — rose to prominence, and began to enclose more than just agricultural land, but also overtook manufacturing methods, materials and people. In some cases they caged the commoners with fences. As people lost their ability to sustain themselves directly, they began to have to do so indirectly through the sale of themselves to the new system. That’s the “social relation” part, people (society) had to literally sell themselves into the system in the form of wage labor which took on market pricing mechanisms. Prior to that, people worked for a certain amount and paid dues to the feudal lords, but it wasn’t a market in the modern sense of price making and taking. Capital (and thus capitalism) is the social relation which necessitates and involves the selling of oneself to the market at market value as just another commodity. You cannot live within the system as we know it, without selling your self (labor) for a wage, which you then use to buy the things to subsist upon. Essentially, a middle-man was created and this middle-man began to siphon off greater and greater commissions and expanded with the increase in ownership capability bought through the new social relationship. This is now the ruling class see wall street and their minions politicians
