I guess i support some form of "socialism". Though i hate using the term "socialism" because really Islam already addressed the issue of wealth inequality long before the West's post-industrial "socialism".
True, but that is very difficult to explain to people on the internet without triggering a flamewar and an assault by the Internet Atheist Brigade
Hmm. Well from what i recall that's not how Marx puts it in the Communist Manifesto. What you stated is basically Capitalism because you keep what you earn from your labor, but not all labor is equal. A heart surgeon's job is not of equal value as that of someone who's a street fruit vendor. So i suppose you don't support Marx's theory of "equal wealth distribution", based on what you have stated here? Because as you said you get to keep the full value of your labor and society naturally values a heart surgeon's work more than that of a school janitor due to greater complication of the former's profession and the greater risk involved (saving lives) and thus the higher amount of qualifications required to do that job compared to the latter, thus earning the former more than the latter. But in a Communist society as envisioned by Marx both would get equal pay.
No, not really. The idea isn't that "everyone gets paid equally". That is one of those misconceptions about Communism.
Let me explain: in Capitalism, workers do not own their means of production. They have to work for people who own those means. Means of production can be farmland, a factory, a restaurant, etc. Usually, the owners do not actually produce anything, but get to keep most of the value of the workers' labour.
When a worker produces, say $100 worth of goods an hour, he actually only gets paid a fraction of that amount in the form of a salary, say $10. Where does the remaining 90$ go? To the owner, as profit. This is called the 'surplus value'. According to Marx, this is exploitation of workers, and the owner taking that surplus value is akin to theft.
Capitalism says that the owner is entitled to all that value because the means of production belong to him and he 'takes the risk', etc. But Marx said that the only reason the owner 'owns' anything is because violence is used to enforce his control over it. (nowadays in the form of the state and police enforcing the property rights; before that, feudal lords controlled land through their armies. In that way, Capitalism is basically Feudalism Plus
TM)
Now consider that the owner usually has many workers working for him - the owner accumulates the wealth that his workers produce, and invests it in the form of capital. An example of capital can be buying more machines for his factory so he can hire even more workers to work for him so he can make even more profit. This is what is called 'capital accumulation' by Marxists.
And here, the whole confrontation between capital and labour that Iqbal talks about in '
mehnat-o-sarmaya' fits in, especially nowadays with automation replacing so many jobs.
It's easier to explain this with a factory as a model, as it's much harder to quantify the value of service jobs etc, but the same principle applies to them as well.
So eventually what you have is that as productivity increases, the workers do not earn more but the owners do. Wealth keeps getting shifted upwards, and the inequality keeps increasing. This can be observed in statistics nowadays;
Marx predicted that if this continues, the workers will eventually be left with nothing and rise up against the owners. What he didn't account for is state-level reform for workers rights, because keep in mind he was writing this in the 1800s when conditions were much, much worse.
But there's the thing; state-level reform for workers rights hasn't really solved the core issue, it has outsourced it. Instead of paying workers full wages, companies shift their manufacturing to places where workers rights aren't as well-established so they can get away with paying sweatshop wages.
Anyway, here's how Communism was supposed to work; workers keep the full value of their labour, so wealth doesn't accumulate in the hands of a few. There is no private control of resources, so there is no need for a state, police, or military to enforce all this. And there is no currency, all resources are pooled and everyone gets as much as they need. Obviously this is a Utopian vision and brings its own problems with it (e.g who handles distribution, and all the other things you have said here)
Clearly in every Marxist state that has existed the government DID own everything. Perhaps because Marx's theories are not practical. Fact is in real life you need an equalizer in the form of a powerful government. People don't just distribute things equally among complete strangers of their own free will because we are naturally tribalistic and thus require a neutral equalizer in the form of government. This is especially true in societies where there is no spiritual incentive like religion, and Communism denies religion and God. Big difference between Marxism in theory and Marxism in practice.
It sounds all hunky dory in theory.
Yeah, I don't really buy the whole stateless equal society view either. Like I said, it's utopian, and too easy to turn into dystopia. But the critique of Capitalism still has merit.
Socialism, which is supposed to be a period in the transition to Communism, does have a state and currency. But workers are still supposed to control the means of production, which are controlled democratically.
In this situation, if a surgeon makes more money than a janitor, it doesn't really matter, as that surgeon isn't going to accumulate a ridiculous amount of wealth. That kind of stuff is barely a sidenote in Marxist theory.
Clearly that isn't how it worked in the USSR. Now, as Dr.Wolff says in that lecture I linked to, Stalin basically said 'this is Socialism' once he took power and proceeded to enforce a system of 'State Capitalism'.
Bernie endorsed Hillary, to the disappointment of his supporters. And No, actually i was against Hillary. Rooted for Trump because of his anti-NeoCon rhetoric and Nationalist message, but im disappointed in him for attacking Syria with the missile strikes. It seems the NeoCons (Neo-Cohens more like it) subverted Trump's administration and are itching for a war with Russia.
I know Bernie endorsed Hillary, that was a disappointment. I'd have preferred him endorsing Jill Stein instead. But I understand politically why he did it, anything to stop Trump, and Jill had no chance of winning with the way the media and establishment treats 3rd parties.
I never bought Trump's crap, even though he played this whole anti-establishment character, he was always one of them. Just look at who he's appointed as his inner circle; Rex Tillerson (i.e Big Oil), Betsy DeVos (
her brother founded Blackwater and is now
'advising' Trump), Jared Kushner (real estate and Zionism).
When he started appointing these people it became blatantly obvious he wasn't going to be anti-War at all.
Hillary and Trump were two sides of the same coin:
He certainly endorsed Hillary much to the dismay of his supporters, despite having promised them he would take the fight to the DNC on their behalf but then chickened out even after it was discovered he was cheated by the DNC in favor of Hillary. That is cowardice.
Also, Bernie has family living in israel and he even justified israeli strikes on Gaza in 2014 as long as they only targeted Hamas. Sure he condemned the indiscriminate bombings of Gaza, but he was not against the fact that Israel was defending itself against alleged Hamas rocket attacks. Of course, i don't blame Bernie,
he is a Jew with family in Israel. He gotta look out for his relatives who are residing on land confiscated from Palestinians only some 69 years ago. Can i blame Jews for looking out for their ethnic interests. No i cannot.
Let's not forget that Bernie is still an American running in America. Being anti-Israel even in the slightest is political suicide there, and as that article posted by
@LA se Karachi shows, even taking a moderate stance on it is considered 'a sledgehammer'.
Misleading:
"Bernie Sanders is taking a sledgehammer to the political status quo on Israel.
Sanders refused to back down Thursday night from his claim that Israel in 2014 used "disproportionate" force to respond to Hamas rocket fire from Gaza while calling for the United States to stop being "one-sided" in the conflict there. In doing so, he upended a long-standing tenet of American politics: that unflinching support for Israel is non-negotiable."
Doesn't really matter anyway, elections are over. And even if he did win, the Establishment, Lobbies, and Institutional Intertia wouldn't have let him change things even if he wanted to.
Right, man,
buying a more than half a million dollar lake-front vacation home besides the one he already owns is not wealthy. You my friend must be a trillionaire if that's considered "not wealthy" according to you when the fact is most of the people who supported Bernie are living paycheck-to-paycheck, many are even homeless.
Not much of a trillionaire myself, unless you're counting in Zimbabwean Dollars, but what I meant was that compared to Hillary, Trump, Obama etc, he isn't really wealthy, never mind when compared to the 1% like Gates or Zuckerberg (who just bought an entire island and could probably buy a country if he really wanted to).
The fact that a convicted bank robber (Stalin) and his gang of budding crooks (Lenin, Trotsky, and the rest) managed to take the reins of a massive country like the Russian Empire, through Communism, says allot about Communism and its original founders.
You should know that before Lenin died,
he wrote a letter warning against Stalin, and Stalin later had Trotsky exiled and murdered.
As for 'convicted bank robber', that doesn't really mean anything if you put it in context of the time. There are countless things you can use against Stalin, he was actually an evil man, but that is probably the weakest considering the situation at the time. If you read
Alan Bullock's 'Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives' (I admit I've only read about a quarter of it), you'll see that Stalin's psychopathy was actually worse than being a mere crook, and the social/economic/political environment under which he grew up was equally reflected in his personality.
The fact that they managed to takeover the entire country does say a lot. It shows how horrible the Tsarist regime was at governance, but also that the people were truly desperate to get rid of them. Keep in mind that the revolution that overthrew the Tsar was different from the Bolshevik Revolution. A lot of people other than the Bolsheviks wanted the Tsar gone, and the first revolution in 1917 was actually a spontaneous popular movement.
The Bolshevik October Revolution, on the other hand, was a planned coup brilliantly executed by Lenin and Trotsky.
I won't defend the Bolsheviks' methods, they were undoubtedly very brutal, definitely not a beacon of morality.
I did not watch the video as i am short on time but i will say this: Where ever Communism established itself All of the people's of those nations gladly threw off the chains of Communism when they got the opportunity. I wonder why they would do that if they were living in Marx's utopia? Or perhaps Marx's utopia turned out to be hell on earth.
Sure, people did starve under the Czar during WW1. Things got tough. It was a war after all.
The video is just a humorous compilation of Carl Sagan saying big numbers, was meant as a joke.
I've already established that the 'Communism' established in the Soviet Union was actually very far from Marx's ideas.
But about the Tsar - people were actually starving long before the war. There was a bit of a revolution in 1905; there were some mutinies, but it was mostly unarmed peasants protesting, and the Tsarist forces basically massacred them. They had a secret police, the Okhrana, well known for torture, violence, and the use of double-agents - and ironically, the Okhrana thought the Bolsheviks were 'relatively harmless' and actively supported them as a counterweight to other revolutionary groups.
The war only made things worse. The Tsarist regime was a brutal tyranny, they deserved to be overthrown.
They did not have Russia's nor the Russian people's interests at heart which is why they sold off considerable Russian territory to the Central Powers in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Bolsheviks were opportunistic criminals of the worst kind. At least the Czar was a son of the soil. Bolsheviks were foreign agents inserted to undermine Russia.
I wouldn't really call the Tsar a 'son of the soil'. European royals at the time were notoriously 'intermarried', and there were a lot of theories at the time among the people of the Tsar being a traitor because he was married to a German.
One thing i'll say though is that the Tsar himself wasn't really that evil, at least not in my view - but he was incompetent at governance and did want absolute power. Much of his regime consisted of rich landowners and feudal-style lords. Some industrialists as well. And if you want some really freaky stuff about the Tsarists, look up Rasputin and prince Yusupov.
This is a fairly decent video about pre-WW1 Russia:
That channel in general is quite good.
As for Brest-Litovsk; the Russians had no chance at winning that war. That war really had brought extreme pain and suffering to the people of Russia, and ending it was a very popular position. Again, while the Bolsheviks did many horrible things, this probably wasn't one of them. As your map shows, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians had actually seized a lot of territory - reclaiming it would have cost hundreds of thousands of Russian lives, and even if the soldiers were willing to fight, they didn't have the industrial capacity to produce weapons, nor the logistical capacity to effectively transport any resources they had to the front.
The Bolsheviks could overthrow the Provisional Government that came after the Tsar partly because of their policy of continuing the war, which was extremely unpopular with soldiers and people in general and made it very easy for the Bolsheviks to gain support.
I agree, and im no fan of unrestricted Capitalism. I believe Capitalism has its merits provided certain destructive aspects of it are removed. Same thing with "Socialism". And honestly like i said i hate using these terms as they restrict positive elements to the specific ideology and because Islam already addresses all of these issues. You should be allowed to keep the fruits of your labor provided your labor doesn't bring harm to your fellow human beings or the environment, and one can incorporate incentives to encourage productive elements of society to utilize their talents to benefit humanity thus including positive elements of socialism and capitalism. Interestingly you will find such an outlook in Fascism and National Socialism, both of which considered themselves as Third Position Ideologies in between Capitalism and Communism.
True, absolutely true.
The reason I lean more towards socialism is because a lot of the discourse on Islamic Economics such as that by Iqbal uses Socialism as a comparison to Islamic Economics.
For example, Iqbal had sympathy for the socialist movement and considered socialism to be "the modern interpretation of Islamic political ideas – a rejection of monarchical, hereditary and oppressive institutions, and racialism."
"But he saw in communism/Marxism the same lack of God as in capitalism; that communism is good in that it rejects the old injustices (theلا in لا إله إلا الله), but fails on the affirmation of truth (إلا الله) – providing little to offer as an alternative. Thus both capitalist-imperialist democracy and revolutionary communism are insufficient for the Islamic state."
(I'm quoting this article:
http://www.stratagem.pk/cover-story/iqbals-vision-of-the-sovereign-state/ Note: I don't support everything on that site, but this analysis is quite interesting)
Those views are pretty obvious in Iqbal's poem
Lenin Khuda ke Hazoor Mei
Let's look at what Islam actually says on economics;
So, instead of 'Surplus Value', Islam has a concept of 'surplus income' which should be given to those who need it. It is pretty close to the Socialist "to each according to their need" principle, but is superior to that as it maintains a balance and is also realistic and practical.
There is also the Bait-ul-Maal, which was a common pool of resources. But some resources were privately owned, and honest trade was encouraged.
There are countless more examples of Islamic economics; it's quite sophisticated and honestly I don't think I'm qualified enough to understand it fully, it's a very complex field, and I haven't even read Iqbal's
ilmul iqtesaad yet.
Honestly, that was completely unintentional. Even i just got it
. Should've have left no pun intended.
Subtle puns are the best puns, it you
hammer it in one can easily get
sickle of it..
Guys can't you take this capitalist/communist/socialist/socialist democrat/Israel/Palestine/Trump/Hillary/Bernie/Marx/Engels/Russia/Czar/Bolshevik things somewhere else? This is really off topic in this thread.
My apologies, it started as an attempt to clear up the political stances of French politicians but you know the internet rabbit-hole phenomenon is pretty powerful.
@Desert Fox tag me if you want to continue this discussion in a different thread
