Canada is ranked number 1 as the Best Country of the World and in Quality of Life

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_property

"In political/economic theory, notably socialist, Marxist, and most anarchist philosophies, the distinction between private and personal property is extremely important. Which items of property constitute which is open to debate. In some economic systems, such as capitalism, private and personal property are considered to be exactly equivalent.[citation needed]

• Personal property or possessions includes "items intended for personal use" (e.g., one's toothbrush, clothes, and vehicles, and sometimes rarely money).[3] It must be gained in a socially fair manner, and the owner has a distributive right to exclude others.
• Private property is a social relationship between the owner and persons deprived, i.e. not a relationship between person and thing. Private property may include artifacts, factories, mines, dams, infrastructure, natural vegetation, mountains, deserts and seas—these generate capital for the owner without the owner having to perform any labour. Conversely, those who perform labour using somebody else's private property are deprived of the value of their work, and are instead given a salary that is disjointed from the value generated by the worker.[citation needed]
• In Marxist theory, the term private property typically refers to capital or the means of production, while personal property refers to consumer and non-capital goods and services.[4][5]"

 

What commie nonsense is this?
Cannot answer a question by yourself?

What means of production?
I have a field and grow potatoes, is it not my field?
If I pay someone to grow the potatoes it stops being MY field?

Sure, no labour involved in creating, things just manifest from the ether realm into existance, magically.

 

I swear I'm not being obtuse, I'm really trying to understand.

What is the difference between an item "intended for personal use" and a factory, mine, or dam? If a person or a group of people build a factory, they intend to personally profit from it. Other people don't have a right to it any more than they do a toothbrush that was produced at the factory.

Who decides what is socially fair? You? Me? The guy who owns the factory? He thinks what he is doing is fair, you say no, we have an impasse. Marx's solution is to let someone else build the factory, then shoot him in the head and take it. That's... not fair? In my estimation?

What defines "labor?" There's a field. You have to plant stuff, you have to apply chemicals, you have to irrigate and harvest and such. Now, arguably, it's more important to know what to plant and when, and which chemicals to apply at what times. It's not appropriate for a person to spend loads of time and capital and effort going to school to figure all that out, then take an equal share with the guy who just cuts the cabbages. It takes a high degree of education and experience to know all that stuff and it's rare, and valuable, it takes almost nothing to be able to harvest the cabbage. So if a person then accumulates a surplus of value for his labor and expertise, why not allow him to purchase the field so he can manage it the way he wants to? And what is to stop him from trading another man some capital for that man's time and labor, and let him do the work in the field while that man does the work of managing it? And why stop him from giving the field to his son, who doesn't know anything except how to manage money?

That's between him and the worker. If the worker says "no, I can get more value for my time and labor elsewhere," he doesn't have to work for the capitalist. And there are anti-trust laws and labor unions that collectively bargain and keep the capitalists in check, and that's appropriate in my opinion because we do know capitalists are in fact the same amount of rotten as any other human being and will absolutely screw other people over if given the chance.

But I'm really not seeing the problem. Managing resources wisely is a form of labor, it has value, it's arguably rarer than the ability to lift a heavy thing. I don't see why owning and managing a mine or a dam, or even profiting off inherited wealth is evil. That mine and that dam is generating value for more than just the owner. It's a source of labor income for the workers, and it provides goods and services to consumers. If you think the owner is getting too big a piece of the pie, find a different means of correcting the situation than killing him. Which is what Marx advocated for with the rise of the proletariat and all of that.

 

Awe you upfet?
Why do I have to be a commie to go and actually get an accurate understanding of what Marx argued? Does everyone disagreeing with communism have to base it on misundertanding and strawmen? Oh, but that's not what it is, I just didn't blindly join your circle jerk about how bad communism is so you got triggered and thought that my willingness to have a deeper understanding of the issues must mean that I'm an evil communist.

Well, I don't know if you realized, but when I'm explaining to you what Marx argued, not what I think, I'm by definition not answering your questions myself. I suppose I could have wasted my time and energy trying to remember what I've read about marxism beforehand.

 

Thanks for engaging in good faith. I'll get back to you when I'm less drunk.

 

I didn't say you are a commie, I said that, that was some commie nonsense. You were just quoting from wikipedia, don't take it as a personal attack.

I get that, but it's more interesting to hear someone's opinion on the matters, and their own understanding of it, because, why anyone would even consider what Marx argued to be anywhere logical or worth of be defended at all, is where the interesting debate is, but just hearing an explanation of what Marx, in his delusions, postulated, as it's something I'm very familiar with already, boring, and truthfully a waste of time.

 

But humans by then were already one of the most dangerous predator on land, everywhere they went where there were animals that did not co-evolve with them and not learned to fear them was accompanied by massive extinctions. Just a few decades ago there were still tribes in africa where as a rite of passage they would go and solo a lion.
And predators rarely attack each others, it is not worth the risk as a simple wound can kill you in the wild the exception being humans, even settled humans were know to hunt other predators to extinction either for protection, sport or just taking out the competition so their hunter-gatherers ancestors must have been much worse as they covered a bigger area.
Big cats today are headed toward certain extinction yet even so they along with most predators will rarely attack a human, their behavior will actually change when they feel that humans are around.

If animals could talk the word "human" would probably be a curse word for them.

It is often believed that hunter gatherers were more famine prone than later civilized societies but there isn't really any study that confirm this, what we do know is that early agriculturalist must have had a relatively low amount of domesticated crop along with their primitives knowledge of agriculture. The bulk of hunter gatherers diet was from scavenging so they had a reliable source of food and in case of drought or flood they could simply move away something agriculturist could not. They also had to cope with disease to their livestock and bad harvest. The reverse in fact must be true as agriculturalist lifespan was 40-50 years compared to hunter gatherers who could live as long as modern non-western humans.

A possible explanation for this could be religion as you need a fixed settlement to build a temple and a priestly and builder class or perhaps just a sacred place for worship in case of animist, there are evidence that even archaic humans had some form of religion from their burial ritual and the oldest recorded temple gobekli is believed to be pre-sedentary era. From there you have the rudiment of a stratified society with a largely powerless chief used to handle disputes and with settlements growing and coming into contact with others tribes with their different gods more and more power is centralized on the leader for self protection in religious war, who in turn used various mean to create a distinct sense of identity in order to wage more wars much like the prince of europe did eventually culminating in nation state.

The important thing as @ShadyPerson put it is the mean of production, hunter gatherers shared all the wealth equally regardless of individual effort, in a communist state the mean of production is the only thing that is either shared or regulated by the community as a whole. This is why western europeans nation today consider themselves social democracy since they heavily regulate private business and taxes their people to death in order to create a welfare state and share the wealth around.

There is not really any nation today that is either capitalist or socialist, they all tend to be mixed-market economy with some like the US tending more toward capitalism. A pure capitalist country possibly was the east indian company and the only modern nation that has some degree of success in socialism as marx envisioned it was revolutionary catalonia, it would have been interesting to see if it could actually work.

 

So I'm not sure if there ever was a 100% definitive distinction given to personal and private property. The broad strokes, as far as I understand, are that if you can use the property gatekeep other people's ability to work and thus get them to work for you instead of working for themselves and thus earn money from the property, it's private property, whereas items that can't reasonably be viewed as such are personal. Marx's criticism of capitalism focused on the inherent antagonism between two classes: the class that has to work to earn money and the class that has the ability to earn money through owning rather than working. Obviously people can't be always clearly divided into such two classes, which is where the shortcomings of the definitions of private and personal come at play:

Somebody mentioned the kulaks earlier in the thread. Soviet hatered of kulaks stemmed from the idea that they were part of the petit burgeois - people who didn't practically speaking own enough to make the main bulk of their living without having to participate in the work on the farm themselves, but who still through owning a significant amount of land and farm tools ie private property were technically part of the capitalist class. Today small business owners would probably fit into the petit burgeois class too. This is problematic, because though any reasonable person - even after conceding Marx's wider ideas on the class struggle - would see that these people clearly aren't the evil oppressors of the working class and are oftentimes rather getting screwed over by the system themselves, they would still be considered enemies of the cause. In Soviet Union this lead to atrocities.

I hope that shed some light on the difference while not pretending that it's a perfectly clear definition.

Social fairness in Marxism was built around the idea that profit gained from owning stuff rather than one's own work was inherently oppressive and unjust. So if you were a member of the capitalist class and the revolution came, you'd lose all your private jets etc. even though they are technically personal property, because they were gained through socially unfair means. I suppose also stealing etc. would be considered socially unfair.

That's actually a pretty ironic question considering that actually it's the modern lefties who have been trying to expand the definition lately to include things like rearing children or the emotional lavor of being there for your loved ones type of stuff. But yeah, I think Marx's definition of labor was probably pretty narrow, only including very traditional types of work.

The thing is that especially during the time Marx was alive the workers had very little choice in terms of who to work for. Founding their own business wasn't as easy for the poor worker at Marx's time as it is for people today. Also going to work somewhere else wasn't oftentimes an option, because in many cities virtually all of the businesses were owned by one company and even if you could muster up enough money to move to the next one, chances were that the working conditions were just as oppressive there. In Marx's time things like big businesses having to play it fair with the smaller ones and workers having rights weren't really a thing. Wether his view of capitalism translates well to modern times is one potential venue of criticism, but in his time saying that the worker didn't really have a choice and was practically coerced into working for the capitalist was oftentimes an accurate statement.

Well, to be specific I believe his idea was rather that the workers should take what is rightfully theirs by whatever means necessary and that since the owning class would be unlikely to agree to it peacefully, that would probably mean violent revolution. Which is just the natural conclusion of his world vies tbh. It's a little bit similar as to what happened with the nazies. (In this specific regard, I still think what nazies did was worse.) If you get someone to believe that there's a certain group of people who runs the world, is way more powerful than them, has all the institutions in their pocket and is actively oppressing everyone and screwing everybody over... Well, you won't really even have to call for violence. The person you just convinced will finish the thought for you.

 

@somuchforsubtlety
I really want to respond to everything point by point and argue with everything, because I value the input and appreciate the time you've put in and I want to honor that, but I have personal limitations. It's not that I can't talk about it, it's that I shouldn't. I'll be typing all day, we'll get way off topic, I won't pay attention to the things in my life that need attention. I'll leave it simply; there's a big difference, in my estimation, between community cooperation on a small scale as is observed in smaller tribal lifestyles, and the kind of large scale cooperation Marx describes as ideal. I don't think the two are comparable, so the claim that communism has been the default for most of human existence is essentially too simplistic to be true. Humans have not been expected to cooperate on such a massive scale as communism requires for an appreciable portion of its existence, relative to the entirety. So, while Marx may or may not have been correct in asserting that his utopian vision was/is a realistic goal we should aim for, and that's something that is up for debate, I think his prescription for how to get there was necessarily flawed. I further think short term history bears this out. Any time Marxism has been applied, atrocities follow and that is in part because he outright demands atrocities. Even worse, though, the thing applied Marxism aims for always fails to materialize. Various cultures have been successful in creating social safety nets to care for individuals who can't care for themselves, for whatever reason, but the successful ones never do it the way Marx described. I think Marxism, ultimately, taps into envy. I think it appeals to our baser urges, and the claim that we're looking to care for society's most vulnerable is merely a backend justification for venting our utter rage on anyone who dares have more than us. I think that applies to money and power, like Marxism initially intended, and I think that applies to race, gender, ability, sexuality, and all the other ways we choose to define and divide ourselves into groups. Marxism, at its core, is observing that someone else has something I want, that I have a right to that thing, and I am justified in taking it by force.

My original claim is that some people over-value equality to the exclusion of basic welfare. They would rather make everyone have 1 than let one person have 5 while most people have 2. That's how you can rate a nation that is poor AF over a rich one. Now, I do understand the need for fairness and I understand that most people get into Marxism out of that sense of fairness, and/or compassion for the destitute. However, on a practical level I think it lets people personally off the hook. The idea that "we" need to help people suggests the best course of action is to force our will on everyone else, whereas the idea that "I" need to help people actually requires personal responsibility and personal sacrifice.

I think that religions, moral movements in general, are prone to the sin of pride. If you're going to be in one, like we are here in NoFap, you have to really watch yourself to make sure you don't become contemptuous of the people outside your movement. But Marxism is naked in its envy. It's predicated on envy, it requires envy to exist, and the entire system is an elaborate mindfuck to turn envy from a sin into a virtue. So, I don't hold it against you if you're attracted to Marxism. I assume that attraction comes from a noble space. However, I strongly believe the ideology poisons people and turns them into hateful monsters who despise everyone who gets in their way, and if they had their way, they'd eventually destroy themselves after they finished destroying everyone else. I think this is what history has shown us.

@ShadyPerson
I guess all the above also applies. I'd love to argue the fine points, Socratically laying bare what I think the fallacies of the ideology are point by point, but in the end the proof is in the results.

I know people can get knee-jerk about communism, or Communism, or Socialism or Marxism. I think there's a reason, though. It's too easy to take it too far, and people get killed. I said before and I'll restate, the Nazis were not worse. The only thing they did that the Soviets didn't was use gas. Unless you figure mass incarceration, slave labor, and murder is somehow worse when race is the motivation, vs. the myriad motivations powering the Soviet's less discriminatory practices, which resulted in a much, much higher body count.

 

The thing with marx is that he never intended his ideology to be used in agrarian backwater like russia or china with corrupt autocratic government with no tradition of any sort of democracy and in fact the bulk of the death toll that occurred there was during the rapid transition from agrarian to industrial except in insane cases like cambodia. Now you said the nazis were not worse? Objectively this is not true, even if you are being generous the total numbers of death during their era happened under stalinism and are not more than 10 million, after his death it all came to a stop. And i don't see why the nazi are being exonerated of the death they caused in the eastern front, stalin might or might not have attacked what we do know is that hitler orderer his thugs dressed in uniforms to to into foreign territories and start killing indiscriminately, today the myth of the "clean wehrmacht" has been discredited in germany and is taught early on in school. They not murderer more civilians in their then expanded territories than stalin they were prevented to kill many more, at least 10 millions soviet unions citizens died due to the war, mostly from ukraine this despite the fact that stalin deported nearly 15 millions of them in the east and the hunger plan which was only a part of the generalplan Ost would have resulted in upward to 30 millions deaths. And this is only in the URSS.

The nazis also did things the soviet didn't do such as genocide, humans experiments and generally just looking at the difference in civilians death that both army caused tell you who was worse, in fact most of their civilians were likely killed by US and UK air force and was probably avoidable. Same thing happened in korea and vietnam and also did not serve any purpose.

 

We don’t know how many people died under Stalin. It’s at least 9 million, which would still be more than Hitler, but that’s the lowest estimate. It could have been as many as 20 million. However, the atrocities were only perfected with Stalin. This is the part Communist apologists refuse to admit, despite the proof: the atrocities began with Lenin.

Not genocide, no. The Soviets were equal opportunity murderers. The secret arrests, though, the long imprisonment, the torture, both psychological and physical, the cattle cars full of frozen corpses, the camps, the starvation rations, the casual abuse, anything you can find in a Holocaust memoir, you can find in Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago.” It was always suspected, but many in the West, particularly the French intelligentsia that was so enamored with socialism, they didn’t want to believe it. Even as they could see East Germany cut off by the Berlin Wall, they wanted to deny it. Solzhenitsyn made that impossible. Then they said, “Oh it was just Stalin, Stalin, he was the one, the trouble was with Stalin.” That ambitious bureaucrat only perfected what others had shown him, and it didn’t stop when he died. It slowed down. It did not stop. And if it was just Stalin, if it was just Russia’s interpretation of socialism, it would have been contained to the Soviets, but it wasn’t. Chairman Mao racked up a body count to make Stalin jealous. Perhaps more impressive, though, would be Fidel Castro in Cuba, who killed and imprisoned more of his population per capita than either of those other dictators. You already mentioned Cambodia. North Korea is still in a socialist hell. Vietnam, Venezuela, anywhere Marxist socialism is tried, it’s followed by massacres, prisons, police states, and economic ruin.

I don’t absolve the Nazis, far from it. They needed to be stopped. I’m proud that the US built the tanks that helped stop them, and my mind is blown by the death count suffered on what we called the Eastern front. Russia produced legions of war heroes. Then they were sent to the gulag.

As for the civilian deaths caused by the US and UK… war is a different tragedy. Avoidable? No. When you go to war, civilians will die. Women and children will die. It’s a horror you cannot avoid, though the hawks always pretend we can. The only reason to go to war is when not doing it will result in something even worse, and that is not a good place to be.

 

That's heavily disputed by scholars.

That's if you count only the jews who died in the holocaust. But the nazies liked shipping a lot of other types of people to the camps as well:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims
The accurate number of nazi victims would be more along the lines of whopping 17 million.

It's also worth taking into account the span of time. Hitler caused those people to die in a span of 12 years, some of which had to be used for concentrating power. That would make a yearly death toll of about 1,42 million a year.

Stalin reigned for 31 years. Even if we were to assume that he managed to kill 20 million people, that still wouldn't be even a million per year. For the relatively brief period of time that nazism reigned in Germany, it managed to be incredibly destructive. These deaths were also certainly pretty intentional, whereas with Stalin there are still disputes over wether many of his atrocities were more due to shitty management skills. (Which isn't to be taken lightly either, it's just not as bad as blatant murder imo.)

Even if the death toll of socialists would exeed that of nazies, that would only be because socialists managed to make their regimes last longer.

My intention isn't to downplay Soviet's crimes. My own people and other fenno-ugric peoples certainly had to suffer our fair share of them. But when you look into it, nazism just is the vilest, most destructive ideology ever. It's a death cult based on hatered of certain types of people.

 

One thing to keep in mind tough is that the "gulag archipelgo" was written in the height of the cold war and the author himself admitted it wasn't really a historical book as he would then have limited access to soviet sources, it was only under gorbatchev that the true scale of what happened in the east and under stalin was made more widely available, when he made his numbers he was only guessing based on memoirs and not official documents(and other like conquest simply pull numbers out of their ass).

In absolute terms the numbers are impressive yes, but only because of the bigger population, even if you take at face value the 50 million death count with most of them having died of famine, proportionally speaking it was no worse than the irish famine or the bengali famine.

No doubt ultimately a dogmatic version of marxist socialism or the various brand of stalinism have proven themselves ineffective but initially it was successful at least compared to their previous regime, i am not an economist but i believe that their failure had a lot to do with not having access to western technology which were almost all produced by anglo-saxons nations.
Until recently north korea was something of an economic success, they actually had a higher gdp than south korea but along with the soviet and i believe most socialist states, their economy petered out in the 1970s.

 

Omg now they are defending north korea too....

See, in that we can agree, socialism is the most destructive ideology ever.

 

That's ridiculous. Half of the Nazi rule was the kill-intensive war. Had Germany won and Hitler kept going for 20 more years who's to say they'd keep killing people at the same pace? Franco's 35 year dictatorship was pretty peaceful once the civil war was over. Not the same sort of regime, but you still can't compare body counts between the Third Reich and USSR and arrive at any sort of meaningful conclusion.

No, not really. Nazism wasn't anything special, just aggressive nationalism. Killing was a means to an end, a way to get rid of perceived threat, not a goal in itself. Same for Marxist-Leninists of Russia, China, Cambodia, ... they also had "certain types of people" who needed to go. The Holocaust would possibly not even happen if it weren't for personal ambitions of Himmler.

 

Lmao. The National Socialist German Workers' Party was about as socialist as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.

 

I disagree with that. There are tons of things to do/view in Canada.

 

It's a shame, as they were, all their campaigning was socialist, they escalated to the more extreme quite rapidly, as all socialist regimes tend do eventually, and of course, as every new socialist regime, they branded themselves as the true actually appliable and right type of socialism, but well.... we all know how their brand of socialism ended up.

Arguing they were not socialist is pretty much not understanding the core values of socialism, and the worldview dynamic that drives it.

There is not a single socialist regime in history that doesn't have blood on their hands.

 

@MrPriest you're talking out of your butt friendo. Nazis weren't socialists because their goals had nothing to do with economy per se, means of production, and all that jazz beyond making tanks and planes. They weren't hostile to private business, capitalism or wealth as long as they weren't making Germany weak. Marx's books were burned and Goebbels attacked commies everytime he opened his mouth.

 

That isn't true. You can look up the original Nazi platform from 1920. It's 50% aggressive nationalism, 50% aggressive socialism, 100% top-down authoritarian. Nationalize the banks, nationalize health care, nationalize the media, it's staggering how closely their values align with the modern progressive movement. The only part where they diverge from Marxist style socialism (I recognize he advocated for that as a mere rung in the ladder toward true Communism, don't get your knickers twisted) is in saying "Deutschland is for Deutschland, we're not worried about anyone else," where Marxism was all, "We're gonna take over the world!"

And of course Nazis were awful and of course they killed more than Jews. They killed Romani, the infirm, gays, Russians. This whole "But the Nazis were worse!" thing is absolutely ridiculous. It's like comparing serial killers, and discussing body counts both confirmed and unconfirmed, and whether or not it's worse if the sick bastard fucked the corpses or raped them when they were alive. The Soviets killed millions. Do you understand millions. Between the Nazis, the Soviets, the CCP, and the DPRK, not to mention the lower body counts but still extreme atrocities of Cambodia, Spain, Cuba, and ever damn banana "republic," they killed more people in the 21st century than every politically and religiously motivated war up to that point combined. To say it's not a good look is an understatement of near criminal proportions.

To say Solzhenitsyn's book isn't historical is not a point in your favor. It's not historical because it was and is impossible for any history on the Soviet Union to be accurate, because they destroyed the records. They hid their crimes. That's not the actions of a legitimate government, that's not the behavior of a people with a viable economic model that just had a few flaws. Killing your own people, and I don't care if its "mostly accidental," there was plenty of on-purpose murder and death by incompetence is still very much dead, is a fucking problem. If you still want to support and celebrate and defend socialism, you have to contend with that. Stop pointing fingers and saying "well that guy was arguably worse," because I don't care. Stop claiming the DPRK's economy was actually pretty okay up until the 1970's, because it was based on slavery. Was the US's economy in the first half of the 1800's okay? Was that legitimate? What about Brazil's, Haiti's all those other nations?

Know which countries manage to have decent economies without enforcing ideological homogeneity by imprisoning and murdering anyone who doesn't agree with them? France. Portugal. Freakin' Indonesia, New Zealand, Panama, Morocco, Denmark, the standard is not "oh we only killed nine million (most conservative estimate) in one instance, so we're actually doing okay." Nations should be killing no million. Nations should only be imprisoning actual criminals, not redefining "criminal" to mean "enemy of the State," and not redefining "enemy of the State" as "anyone so much as thinks a thought that might be interpreted as anti-State."

Do you think I'm getting unhinged? Listen to yourselves. You are defending rapists and murderers! This isn't a decent idea with a few flaws, it's been tried, many times, and it ends in piles of rotting corpses every time. It's a bad idea. Until you see that and publicly admit it, no sane person is going to take you seriously.

"Well capitalists poisone-" stfu. Yes, they did, some people are bad, but don't point at a little gray to justify your midnight black. Don't point to a little white mold on my cheese to distract from the fact that yours is a pile of green, furry disease. Quit pretending it's even remotely the same thing.

Good lord, I'm going to have to unfollow, I have things I need to do. No what? No. This is beyond logic. Nobody defends socialism without either being incredibly naive, incredibly intellectually dishonest, and/or having some kind of personal connection. What is your deal with socialism? Why do you need it to be okay?