I've been re-reading the Communist Manifesto, I wanted to read it now that my political ideas have changed since my first year of university. It's been a very interesting experience I must say, but that aside, there was a point that's just stuck in my head. I've tried to research it but haven't had all that much, so I am bringing it to you. In the CM Marx asks why people have such a hard time giving up private property when 9/10th of people do not have private property. I assume these are correct stats for the time, but I haven't been able to find stats for today. Does anyone know what percentage of people in the world do not have private property? (I'm guessing it's about the same) Thanks! peace.
obviously killed my short term memory, though I was still on the communism forum hahahaha. Well here I am, blonde but brilliant hahaha! muah!
Would you consider your own body private property? If so then everyone owns property. Would you like to give that up?
Wondering if Marx meant Real Property ( Real estate ) or personal property. Probably Real Estate.. In The USA approx 65% of people own instead of rent.
By that, Marx was reffering to the means of production, so the figures are proabably still pretty accurate. WHere Marx is dated is that it was pre-imperialism, thus reading of lenins works are important.
Everybody on planet Earth owns something! Even the most collectivist of regimes will leave you with your cooking pots, personal photographs, clothing. What property is Marx refering to?
He is referring to those resources that everyone needs and uses such as land, natural resources and certain technologies that everyone should have equal rights to.
Does anyone know what percentage of people in the world do not have private property? I do not own land, a business, nor a house, nor even a car, so I would probably qualify as not owning private property. But that's by American legal standards. I believe that the Supreme Court ruled that even an automobile is not considered "private property" and in forfeiture cases can thus be seized without any due process of law. I don't know the name of the case, but the majority opinion was written by Clarence Thomas in a Michigan case.
This is either some really fucked-up come on or anti-communist paranoia. I can only hope it's the former!!!
The deviant Karl Marx was working for the central bankers known as the Rothschilds. He didn't even write the Communist Manifesto, his name was simply added to it. It makes sense "Marx" and his commie followers would be against private property. This way the common person doesn't own land, but the government owns and controls it all. Or, should I say the owners of that government owns and controls it all.
Thats great for you. I on the other hand enjoy a place I call mine. A place that if I dont want company they dont have the right to enter. A place that when I die I know my kids can use either to live or to sell to use the efforts of my labor to do with as they please. Niether is right, its just a choice.
You can still have a place that you call "yours" without "owning" a natural resource that everyone else needs equal access to. You do realize that some people buy up acres and acres, gate it off, put up signs (etc) just FOR THE PURPOSE of "keep people off." That's digusting. You can still have privacy under the non-feudal system.
'The deviant Karl Marx' 'commie followers' LOL. Your paranoia could almost seem credible if you didn't resort to using right wing McCarthy-era lingo in an attempt to give your opinions weight. No, there is no private property under Communism, but 'public' property doesn't have the same meaning as it does under capitalism. Right now, you have 'public' spaces which are basically 'private' spaces which are owned by the government. The government is supposedly on 'your' side, but we are all subject to whatever laws that congress or whatever passes-- so really, these 'public' spaces are only as free as a series of very private interests want them to be. So if your freedom was getting in their way, the capitalists would take it from you, and it would work, because they could. Under communism, the government doesn't own the spaces at all-- YOU do. The government is supposed to (yes, I say 'supposed to' because we all know it's an idealistic system) manage and protect your interests. They cannot buy or sell the land, or change the laws without the consent of a majority of shareholders-- and YOU are a shareholder. Under capitalism, they can do this-- but at the same time because we're under a very liberal form of capitalism, it tends not to happen. In a way, the worker's revolution did happen, and that's why we have labour unions now. Labour unions are similar to communist society-- the people make demands and if their demands are not met or acceptable compromises are not made, then they exercise their control over the means of production (namely, that those means need operators), and they strike. Of course, nowadays the unions are mostly just a bunch of gangsters milking money from the upper management under the threat of losses in production. Before that, workers were subjected to arduous and unfairly long days just to scrape by with enough to support their families. That was true capitalism-- basically, a kind of slavery in which you were paid only enough to provide yourself and your family with the most basic necessities, and then because you have no pension, working every day for the rest of your life, living just long enough to watch your sons and daughters meet the same fate. So to answer the original question, yes, things have changed a great deal. Now upper management has to return some of the cash they make from the exploitation of the manual labourers to the labourers themselves-- a very Marxist idea. Under pure capitalism, the workers would be given the bare minimum by the upper management-- usually just enough to keep them alive and making babies so that one day the factories could get more workers. Under a pure communist society, all of the profits from the factory that go into the hands of upper management would go directly to the employees and the upper management equally. The problem is that the upper management is almost always corrupt, and the lower echelons are almost always too stupid, gullible, brainwashed or exhausted to demand what is rightfully theirs. Unfortunately, modern techonology has once more provided the capitalists with slaves-- they have robots doing the work so they don't need to pay people who could be unionized-- so the people who would have worked in a unionized factory now end up working jobs that aren't unionized, barely scraping by again... and once more, the cycle is reset. Essentially, communism would mean that a person, by virtue of having been born/employed, is given a share of their workplace/surroundings. They have the right to overrule company decisions if enough of them get together, because they own shares in the company-- if they can rally the people to their cause, the labourers can fire the upper management or even sell the factory if their demands aren't met. This way, the interests of the people are put before the capitalist myth of 'progress'-- in that the workers could even veto their own replacement by robots. Sure, this would impede production, but things would definitely stabilize, and there would be less of a division between the classes. As it is, upper management always retains a majority of shares-- the owner has at least 51 percent, and the rest of it trickles down from upper management all the way down until the people at the bottom get eighth shares or sixteenth shares, hardly anything-- definitely not enough to influence the company's decision-making, or to prevent themselves from being replaced by robots, or by some guy who can do two jobs at once, or by some other guy who just finished some degree that puts him ahead of the guy who finished the same degree five years ago. Under communism, the people would be entitled to a home the same as everyone else's. They would be entitled to health care. They would not have to secure more or less ownership than someone else depending on how they performed in the ratrace, or whether or not some rich fucking bastard thought they looked like their son, or if that same rich bastard stood to gain more from letting them go as opposed to keeping them around.
The fact is communism was funded into existence by the very same wealthy elite you and other self-professed "communists" oppose, as the dialectic opposition to capitalism. It was designed to consolidate wealth into the hands of the ruling class while enslaving the peasantry. Both capitalism and communism are products of the same few people, and anyone who has done their research knows this. Communism in the early half of the 20th century wasn't the product of downtrodden peasants as we are lead to believe by mainstream history. It's a fact that Trotsky was working in New York and was funded by Wall Street bankers to foment a revolution by overthrowing the pre-existing system in Russia for an even more ruthless form of slavery. Even Marx was in the pay of the central bankers known as the Rothschilds. Shouldn't you be asking yourself why, if communism is opposed to capitalism, then why was it funded into existence by people commonly known as "capitalists"? What would the big banks have to gain from bankrolling communism? Communism is a massive sham, and only the most gullible people believe in it.
Well, obviously this is true, since it was at that time that intellectuals began to critically examine the world's economic systems, and developed a terminology to classify and thereby clarify the nature of those systems. No one is led to believe that. Marx himself did not believe that, and did not claim that he was not bourgeoisie. This wasn't about people standing up for what they wanted, it was about a group of educated people realizing that the capitalist system was oppressing certain people and they wanted to do something about it. They did it because they did not like exploitation, not because they themselves were being exploited. In fact, one thing Marx believed in the most was that the 'downtrodden peasants' would need to be better educated before they could realize what they could have but didn't have because of the oppressive capitalist system. I completely disagree that Trotsky intentionally wanted to cause harm for people. In fact, the only reason the revolution even happened was because of the horrible oppressive regime which preceded it. If no one was willing to listen, or if things weren't bad enough for the people to actually WANT a revolution, then it probably would have never happened. To be honest, I'm not even all that sure what you're trying to say. When someone believes in something and they want to do something about it, they ask for help. If someone else is willing to help them, are they supposed to say 'no, I don't want your help'?? Because communism did not yet exist as anything but an idea, thereby making the Rothschilds capitalists by default. Maybe because they were all Jewish. Maybe because they believed it could work??? Communism has always been more popular among the upper class intellectual elite than the uneducated masses. If you look at America or Canada, it's usually the educated who are leaning left and the ignorant cowboys and 'I earned this, this is mine' people who are leaning right. Intelligence often leads to success. So to answer your question, perhaps the Rothschilds believed in what Marx was saying. Rich people are not all evildoers who never want to see an end to worker exploitation. I disagree. I've met some incredibly bright people-- and before the world makes them totally cynical about things and they turn liberal, they all flirt with leftist ideals. They do this because the sense of equality among all people appeals to them, at least until they write it all off as unrealistic 'because of how weak and evil people are in their hearts'. If you ask me, you're more gullible if you buy into these conspiracies and if you believe that all anyone ever wants is to fuck everyone else over in order to make money. A tiny minority of people actually enjoy it (sociopaths, for example), but a lot of people do it only because that's what's expected of them in a capitalist society. And some people refuse to do it, or do it and channel the profits into causes that can help people, because it's what they believe in.
pressed_rat does not seem to understand the original form of communism. We now see a corrupted communism (soviet union, cuba, ect.) This is where or views shift from marx's philosophy to how we see communism today as somewhat of a dictatorship. Marx saw communism more of a primital way of living. Hunt and gather. Go to the source, create, use, build, and everything is open to access for the common man. The only "government" there was, besides defining the obvious of right and wrong (ex. murder to steal is obviously punishable), was to protect, and represent. The government did not own the land you lived on, you lived on the earth, not the government. What you created was yours, you sell, you trade, you do what you want with it. But what ever you receive from your trade or gather is all yours, the government has nothing to do with it. Where in our capitalistic world, the government owns us, and our lives. They actually have a higher authority, one person of authority can say the exact opposite of what the rest of the citizens say, and be correct. In communism, its living together, working together, and not so much of equality among "citizens" but individualism, yet everybody still being an equal in power. Stateless & classes.
