BOB MCDONALD: Capitalism is the "opposite" of communism. Socialism is the combination of both.SDF: If you'd read this message you might see a distinction between "communism" and any previous regime claiming to be "communist." Reading this post might help you define socialism or communism in a better way -- "communism" might describe certain aspects of previous hand-to-mouth societies, in an earlier era of history, but both "communism" and "socialism" in the modern, industrial-society, sense involve belief in a utopian society which has never come to fruition in all of human history. We've covered this before, here in this Debating Room.
Thus Sir Thomas More's 1516-1517 text UTOPIA will emphasize that, in the perfect world dreamed by More, everything is shared in common. The word "communism," like the words "common" and "community," comes from a Latin root that means "sharing." Communism is essentially a utopian construct.
Previous attempts at communism and socialism failed because they tried to force the perfect society upon a nation-state for all the wrong reasons, and thus "communism" and "socialism" became names for reactionary regimes vaguely synonymous with "fascism," whose inventor, Benito Mussolini, had been a member of the Italian Socialist Party before becoming dictator of Italy.
BOB MCDONALD: Both socialism and communism have appeared and died in less than 100 years.
SDF: No, they haven't, for reasons I explained above. Bob McDonald is confusing capitalism, socialism, and communism with national systems that use three different types of MIXED ECONOMY (corresponding roughly to the United States, Sweden, and the Soviet Union), all of which require constant state intervention to remain in business.
I am frustrated by the continuing silliness of pro-capitalist posts, and I'm wondering out loud, here, if capitalism stupefies people and makes them incapable of rational political discussion by depriving political words of their meanings, doubtless through the process of constant misuse of political vocabulary by journalistic hacks. Thusly the word "liberal" (a word invented to describe believers in the LIBERTY to be wrested from governments) has in American political discourse become synonymous with belief in "big government," and the word "conservative" has become synonymous not with the CONSERVATION which supplied the root prefix of "conservative," but with the radically destructive utopian vision of capitalism preached by Newt Gingrich and by that most vindictive of mouthpieces for the lunatic Right, Rush Limbaugh.
If readers here want to read more on the destruction of politics by capitalist journalism, the journalistic destruction of the English language has already been described by George Orwell in an essay titled "Politics and the English Language," an essay which ought to be required reading for all high school juniors, and the journalistic destruction of political meaning in general is described in a book of essays by Daniel J. Boorstin called THE IMAGE. And then there's this post...
BOB MCDONALD: Other forms of society exist (fiefdoms, tribal organizations, religous compounds, etc...). If you examine the history of the world, and keep in context the knowledge and education of the people during different times, the progreession of societies from "survival of the fittest" to our current structure (taken as a whole) is both logical and natural.
SDF: Histories such as Clive Ponting's GREEN HISTORY OF THE WORLD and synopses of world history such as is given in Jeremy Rifkin's ENTROPY offer a version of world history where the exponential increases in human exploitation of the environment, leading up to the high-intensity society of the present day, are highlighted. The collision of capitalist world-society with the various possibilities of environmental disaster (due to the thinning of the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, the simplification of the genepool due to the ongoing extinction of species of plant and animal, the destruction of the topsoil by urbanization, overfarming etc.) is neither logical nor natural.
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