Th Official Socialism Thread

Could Marxism and all that stuff work if people were not selfish. Let's take a good look at two instances of Socialism, the early church and the Russian Revolution. The early church was socialist, and it grew very quickly. Russia was ruined because of selfishness when it moved to socialism.

V-03 EDIT: This is a good topic, but the Senate has been flooded in the past few days with a rash of new threads on society/civilization and the different philosophies of governing it. Also, this has the potential to intermix religion and society, on which there are already numerous discussions going on in the Senate. This trend needs to slow down, so I am going to lock this .

Thank you .

V-03

 

There are two innate problems with socialism, three if you count socialists themselves.

Firstly, any system that requires humans to be more than human is predoomed to failure. It's why in so many cases, where the state is meant to serve the people, socialists end up concluding that the people should serve the state.

Secondly, it is a fundamentally unfair economic model. People talk about socialism like it's a political system but that is sheer ignorance talking. Like capitalism, socialism is one method of collecting surplus and then deciding what to do with it. Unlike capitalism, it does not provide incentives to increase production. Although I'm well aware that Mr Marx and Mr Engels, most notably, concluded that people would see the obvious wisdom of the greater socialist good and work towards it, I would hesitate to take their statements too seriously as Mr Engels owned a factory and was thus the very capitalist they sought to eliminate, and Mr Marx was so very bourgeois it's a surprise he didn't implode with self-loathing.

My advice to you, as a political scientist, is to use Marxism as a useful tool for analysing first/third world relations without necessarily subscribing to his perscriptions for it. I'd also say that Lenin's famous essay, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism is the basis for so much dependency theory and really, the model of analysis forumlated by Mr Marx and later expanded by Mr Lenin is actually somewhat sound, however crazy their conclusions. You only need look to Naomi Klein's No Logo to see how Marxism can be applied for analytical purposes and then turned into a book every fashionable lefty must own even though they are addicted to brands.

E_S