Pandemoniak to Bloody Baro Continued

[chequita guevara]

My goodness, Archaic, the next time you choose someone to "refute" the Manifesto, choose someone who actually understands it. Your advocacy of this rather pedestrian essay only goes to demonstrate the maxim that the best writing is the writing we already agree with.

While the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a small little pamphlet, only 48 pages, twenty five quotes, ten of them being the "commandments of communism," are wholly inadequate to understanding the ideas contained within. When reading Wong's essay, I get the impression that he had a preconceived idea as to what it was about, then selectively culled quotes to demonstrate his lack of understanding.

Before I get into shredding this silliness, let's discuss what the Manifesto actually is. The Manifesto, contrary to the hopes of the lazy, is not the Bible of Communism. It is not a set of "commandments," nor a proclaimation for all Communists for all time. You cannot read the Manifesto hoping to understand the whole of the movement, what it thinks, what it does, any more than you can hope to understand what American literature by reading Johnny Tremain.

In the first section of the Manifesto Marx lays out, in short form, the materialist view of history. Marx shows how the organization of labor drives the organization of society and how each society contains within it the seeds of the next society. In the second section Marx discusses the goal of communism, "the abolition of private property." These are really the only two important sections for us, the third and fourth relating to political movements of the 19th Century that no longer exist.

Of the Manifesto Marx wrote four years later,

Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.

On to Wong!

And in spite of the utter failure of communism in the twentieth century, its defenders attack any criticism as "capitalist dogma".[sic]

This is a broad declaration against millions of people. While it's true that some people might react in a knee jerk fashion, as my response here demonstrates, that isn't true.

The problem with Marx's grandiose vision of social engineering is that it assumes humans will play by rules which are against their nature,

What nature? The only two things that can be truthfully said about human nature are the humans are social and that they create themselves. First, all humans everywhere are dependent upon the labor of other humans for their existence. We are not animals that go our own way upon birth. We are taught, protected, fed, clothed, housed, and entertained from birth by other human beings. We take this with us whereever we go. There is no self-made man. Hermits take their education with them. This is the mode of existence for our species. This is our nature.

The second aspect of our nature derives from this, as we are dependent upon others for everything, we are made by each other. Humans, therefore, create themselves. If human nature couldn't be shaped, the entire advertising industry would never have existed. Our parents shape us, our friends, our teachers, our communities shape us. And so it should be no coincidence that capitalist society creates humans that find capitalist society fits them. Just as it should be no coincidence that I happen to cook food that I like to eat. Sandwiches don't come out natureally the way I want them to be, and neither do humans "naturally" fit capitalism. We make them fit our needs.

Complex systems such as societies and economies tend to obey the laws of chaos theory;

I'm sure it would surprise Wong to know that Marx and Engels were the first people to describe what is today termed Chaos Theory. Although he is often not given credit for it, Engels was the first person to descibe the complexity and chaos of nature in his work The Dialectics of Nature. Ilya Prigogene, the famous Chaos scientist, does credit Marx and Engles in his work, Order Out of Chaos. However, he had the benefit of a socialist education before moving to the West, and thus was aware of these contributions.

It is a laudable goal to improve society, but it should be done through gradual change, not "revolution".

There's nothing about this in the Manifesto. Wong needs to stick to his topic.

Humans won't work as hard without self-interest to motivate them,

And yet, humans do work very hard without self-interest to motivate them. What inspires military men to charge into the face of death? Self-interest? On a micro level, they don't want to let their comrades down. On a macro-level, they don't want to let their nation or country or King down. Millions of people in the USSR threw themselves into their work in the 1930s because they believed they were building a better tomorrow (Stalinist terror not withstanding). People volunteer to fight forest fires and floods who aren't threatened. Parents sacrifice for their children. Sacrifice is just as much a part of human nature as self-interest.

And who says that communism and socialism aren't about self-interest? I'm not a commie because I think everyone else should have a better world. I'm a commie cuz I want to live in a better world, where I don't have to worry about work or shelter or crime, where I have a say in my society as an average person.

I'll get to the rest of Wong's essay later. Right now I have some errands to run.

edit: fixed typos.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Archaic
I'm sure you know by now that Marx had no knowledge or grounding in either disipline. He was a philosopher, and not an especially good one at that.

I suppose Adam Smith's divinity training rendered him especially qualified to write the first study of capitalism. Marx wasn't a philosopher, even if that's what he studied at the university. He was an economist, a sociologist, and a revolutionary.

On to Wong's argument!

"Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat." This is Karl Marx's biggest mistake: his assumption that all of the societal classes in an industrialized world will coalesce into two remaining classes: wealthy industrial property owners and starving labourers. . . [however] the existence of a viable middle ground literally cuts his knees out from under him.

Wong here demonstrates a fundimental misunderstanding of Marx. Nowhere does Marx say that all other classes will disappear, rather, that they are disappearing. The other classes in society are becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of society. When Marx wrote this, there was still a class of rentiers and aristocracy. Where are these classes today? Where are the peasants and artisans? More than fifty percent of the population of the US were farmers in 1900, today, less than 5%. Rather, the vast majority of the population has become working class.

In 1990, the percentage of the proletarian working class in the US dipped below 50% for the first time since it became the majority class. The working class, however, still constitutes vast majority of the population. White collar, blue collar, pink collar, brown collar, etc. are all workers. Just because you don't work in a factory doesn't mean you aren't a worker. Just because you have house and two cars doesn't mean you are middle class. If you sell your ability to work for someone, you're a worker. Some 80% of the US population falls into this catagory. Less than ten percent are entreprenuers and true middle class. Less than one percent are actual capitalists.

That some unionized workers and middle management make enough money to live a comfortable life in no way invalidates Marx's proposition that the world is more and more dividing. Capitalism has not yet completed its world historic task of destroying all of the old relations in society. China only acheived 50% working class population a few years ago. In most of the world, this is still yet to be achieved.

"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers." This is really just a repetition of his earlier attempt to pretend that society is polarized into those who work and those who live off their money.

Actually, it's not. Wong again shows his complete misunderstanding of Marx and his theories here. What Marx is saying is that instead of the old system of relations, where people were tied together by legal obligations, by religion, etc. capitalism has replaced it with contractual relations. I should think a libertarian would see this as a good thing. Capitalism abolished slavery, it abolished feudalism. These methods of commanding labor were too inefficient, they stood in the way of profit and growth.

So the capitalists violently overthrew them, in the English Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the conquest of the Colonial world. This was progress. Far from decrying this state of affairs, Marx was giving capitalism praises for destroying the old systems of human obligation. Of course, what Marx didn't foresee was that capitalism discovered later it could make use of these old forms of obligation for its own purposes.

"Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells." . . . But why does someone have to be in "control" of the economy?

Here Wong simply engages in the assertion that laissez-faire is inherently superior without offering any support. It's not so much an argument against what Marx is writing rather than Wong claiming that Marx is wrong.

"It is enough to mention the commercial crises [recessions] that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly." . . . [L]ike any self-regulating system, a free market economy corrects itself whenever it gets "out of whack". Sometimes, this correction comes in the form of a recession, and sometimes, it comes in the form of a boom. . . . Millions of people subtly and collectively influence the cyclical direction of countless separate industries through their spending and investing choices (every dollar counts as a "vote" of sorts, making the free market more democratic than the government in many ways). . . . At all times, it is the masses who are truly in control of the economy. . . .

Yes, the masses control the economy by throwing themselves out of work, losing their homes, starving, and dying. What Wong fails to write is that prior to the introduction of Keynesian economics, each collapse of the economy, from the first in 1825, to the Great Depression itself, got worse and worse. While he blithley talks about voting with dollars and the masses controlling their economy, people's lives are ruined and destroyed. While the worst effects have been mitigated by government intervention in the industrialized world, in the Third World recession means death. Tens of millions of people die every year paradoxically because the economy is too productive. He may as well celebrate the Ukrainian famine or the Nazi holocaust, both of which created vast industrial growth.

"Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him." This is an example of Karl Marx's absolutely incredible arrogance. How can an ivory tower intellectual who never worked in a factory presume to know what it's like?

This is an example of the incredible arrogance of Michael Wong. Does he despute the universally acknowledged fact that 19th century factories were hellholes!?! Has the ivory tower intellectual, Michael Wong, ever worked in a factory? Does he know what it was like? Has he ever lived in a proletarian neighborhood like Marx? Did he live and work with laborers for most his life, like Marx? Well I have, Mr Wong, and guess what? It sucks!

Factory work is incredibly tedious, boring, and dangerous. And that was in the 1980s. One could simply imagine what life was like working in the furnaces of 1840s England . . . or one could read any book about what it was like. Even today in the United States, 75,000 Americans die because of industrial accidents and diseases. Even office workers suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome, glaucoma, and "sick" buildings.

This finishes his so-called critique of Marx's first section. What should be clear to even a casual student of economic history, let alone political theory, is that Wong doesn't have a clue about what he is writing. His assumptions of Marx's meaning are riddled with errors. His understanding of the 19th Century is simply laughable. Like many libertarians, he looks at the world around him and assumes it has always been. I have little hope that his work improves when he "debates" the second section of Marx's Manifesto.

[Archaic]

Pandemoniak, I'm still waiting. Or are you going to let your friends speak for you? You really shouldn't. Not with all the debating fallacies they're comitting. So many strawmans, so many hasty generalizations. I'm not even going to need to know the history to pull what's been said here to pieces.

lucky22...why should I bother articulating myself to someone predisposed towards being foolish? You don't like my attitude, fine, I don't frankly give a damn. But as I said, the points I've made and the points I will raise once Pandemoniak gets his arse in gear aren't in any way invalidated by the manner in which I present them.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Archaic
Pandemoniak, I'm still waiting. Or are you going to let your friends speak for you? You really shouldn't. Not with all the debating fallacies they're comitting. So many strawmans, so many hasty generalizations. I'm not even going to need to know the history to pull what's been said here to pieces.

You talk a lotta smack, but so far your only argument so far has been to post some wannabe Fukiyama piece-a-crap. You are such a hypocrite, talkin' smack to Pandemoniak about how others are carryin' his load when you haven't even tried to make your own argument. Whatever! If you could make an argument, you'd have done so.

You think you can take me on? Bring it on baby.

[The Mad Monk]

Is anyone else getting confused by che's / Pandemoniak's avatars?

[DinoDoc]

It's che's way of telling us that he made a French dl.

[chequita guevara]

The tough part is flying back and forth from France so I can fool the Mod's with the different IPs.

[chequita guevara]

Yeah, Archaic, I thought so. You talk a big talk but when the gloves are thrown down, you run away. Don't think I didn't see you on last night.

[Az]

he was away , you see.

( Bump, and thumbs-up on the avatar, che. )

[Pandemoniak]

Che, you have a wonderful new trotskyst avatar !!!

sorry I wont put "member of the Poly communist party on my profile, since I just love to tell people I'm french... Country of cheese and socialism you see...

To Archaic, my answer is ready, but the day you'll have a normal behavior (unlike a scornful behavio), I will post my counter about Wong pitiful essay (Damn, if i was asstupidas Wong, I wouldnt even dare to play a Bryan Reynolds game... ). You will mark I'm dont even have to explain lots of things to Wong, I just have to quote the Manifesto next lines, since Marx wis really clear about what he says...

REMEMBER :
My words are backed with Marxism

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Pandemoniak
Che, you have a wonderful new trotskyst avatar !!! sorry I wont put "member of the Poly communist party on my profile, since I just love to tell people I'm french... Country of cheese and socialism you see...

Do like Azazel and Frankychan do, put both. Comrade Azazel is head of our Iraeli cell, while Frankychan is head of our Hawaiian cell. We need a cell in France.

[DinoDoc]

My criticisms of Marxism:

1) Capitalism hasn't fallen and has been able to reform itself.

2) I don't like the tendency among many Marxist scholars to rely on economic factors to explain political behavior.

I'm sure that I'll think of more later.

[chequita guevara]

Yeah yeah.

[DinoDoc]

I can expand upon my statements if you wish.

[chequita guevara]

If you must, but I'm not really in the mood to debate. I wanna get back to Warcraft III. I just wanted to see if that Aussie had removed his tail from between his legs yet. I can debate tomorrow if you wish, which is no reason not to expand upon your statements tonight (do keep in mind I still have to finish with Wong). And Yes, I do want to play you sometime, but I wanna get through the campaign first.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
And Yes, I do want to play you sometime, but I wanna get through the campaign first.

I can wait.

[DinoDoc]

I can give you tips on the missions though.

[Archaic]

*Rolls his eyes*

I don't post for one day and you're already claiming victory? I said in my earlier post that I refuse on principle to reply until Pandemoniak makes his reply. I stick to that. It's not my fault you're an unobservant fool.

Pandemoniak, stop stalling and whinging and crying foul. It's pathetic.

[Az]

WarCraft 3 - suddenly the orcs are intelligent and nice . so, from being the Grizzly , manure tossing apes of Episode 2, they've suddenly started behaving like English gentlemen ( I know that your hero from the Orc campaign has been supposedly raised by humans but still ). I really liked the way they made the human warriors weaker , and cheaper, though.

just my 2c.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Azazel
WarCraft 3 - suddenly the orcs are intelligent and nice .

They carried on with the plot from Warcraft Adventures.

[FlameFlash]

lucky22 reassured me here...
FlameFlash is right about my motivations for that parting shot. However, part of my motivation was to be aggravating and for that I apologize.

Glad to know I was on target... especially since I've been accused rather often of not understanding where others are coming from (nobody that's posted on this thread so far... thinking of another time and place.)

Archaic rambled this...*Yawns* How rude I might be doesn't make my points any less valid. Attack the theory, not the person Pandemoniak. While the gullable are easily swayed to a person who makes their opponent look like the "bad guy", I would hope the intellectual level of people here is far above that. If I'm a "bad guy" for raising legitimate concerns about your ability to understand both politics and economics, concerns you have yet to prove are unfounded, then I guess I'm a "bad guy".

No, not gullable... wise... message board wise. He's not calling you a "bad guy" he's calling you a troll for simply throwing rude comments at the poster and not the idea.

I make no secret of the fact that I consider those clinging to Marx's outdated (And wrong even in his time!) political and economic beliefs (I'm sure you know by now that Marx had no knowledge or grounding in either disipline. He was a philosopher, and not an especially good one at that.) to be on the same intellectual level as young earth creationists. It's up to you to sway me from that, if you can. So stop stalling and crying "foul!" and post something for yourself instead of having others post things for you. I refuse to make further replies to the others here until

Umm... what was that about gullable people and posters? Drop the anti-Marxism rhetoric and just argue the "facts" that you've been calling for.

You get everyone else making these cheerleader posts for you out of this thread (Flameflash, I know you're not a cheerleader for him, but in fairness to him, you should probably stop posting too. If this is just going to be me and him, it should be *just* me and him.)

Sorry, Archaic... but once you entered the realm of OT, as you'll see below in later posts, threads get hijacked rather often. No matter how this thread started out... it hasn't remained what it once was, so trying to chase the rest of us who also have good ideas and thoughts away with a stick because we might counter you or anybody else is just plain out of line.

If you two want it private, you'll take it to another media besides a message board. Until then, I'm here for the duration of this thread to both attempt to remain an unbiased commenter, and to watch, listen, and learn. Unfortunately, you're keeping me from doing any of those things currently.

Your source has been attacked... back up your source with credetials of why we should even take the source seriously... I wouldn't be surprised if that's what Pandemoniak is waiting for. He retorted, but he retorted in a way you didn't like nor expect it would seem, and you therefore continue to say that he knows nothing in the different realms that the debate is taking place within.

Oh, and for the record, I've never directly called you stupid. You inferred that on your own, as any impartial observer could see.

Well, you're right about that... you just said that he didn't know anything as far as economics or politics goes... or to better paraphrase what you said, a first year poli sci and econ major knows more than him...

To me, that's insulting his knowledge just as much as if you came out and said, "hey, you're stupid, so shut up."

Paraphrase of che
Archaic, you're full of it.
Please note these opinions and the above quote are actually only the work of me, FlameFlash

Archaic responds?
Pandemoniak, I'm still waiting. Or are you going to let your friends speak for you? You really shouldn't. Not with all the debating fallacies they're comitting. So many strawmans, so many hasty generalizations. I'm not even going to need to know the history to pull what's been said here to pieces.

As I said above... once you go OT and message board as a way to debate something, it's not his "friends" speaking for him... it's just other people with similar ideas thinking that yours are bunk and responding to them in kind. Nothing to do with friendship, recruitment, or whatever.

And BTW... now you're crying foul... "strawmans... hasty generalizations" reeks of you just complaining and doing what you accused Pandemoniak of doing a little earlier.

lucky22...why should I bother articulating myself to someone predisposed towards being foolish? You don't like my attitude, fine, I don't frankly give a damn. But as I said, the points I've made and the points I will raise once Pandemoniak gets his arse in gear aren't in any way invalidated by the manner in which I present them.

So you're not going to address the points brought about from lucky22 just because you basically don't feel like it? Bad excuse... to me that reads, "Hey, I'm trolling against Pandemoniak so the rest of you can just go play in traffic because all I'm going to do is harass him for a response and not even care that I'm getting some high quality responses from other sources."

*Rolls his eyes*

I don't post for one day and you're already claiming victory? I said in my earlier post that I refuse on principle to reply until Pandemoniak makes his reply. I stick to that. It's not my fault you're an unobservant fool.

Pandemoniak, stop stalling and whinging and crying foul. It's pathetic.

And all that was was a troll... especially against what Pandemoniak said... he called for you to be more polite before he'd even dignify you with a response... and what do you do? You troll some more!

And then of course, as you can see, Archaic... threads can be hijacked... WarCraft III talk has begun!

Personally, I've never been a fan of the series... I'm reminded of a slightly recent Penny Arcade (online comic) strip talking about the difficulty of MP on that game... I prefer to actually have a chance and not need to memorize every last peice and where it is... I may be a Gemini... but I still like to actually be able to play and not be sent into chaos... of course, all my generalizations about the game are being made from WarCraft II... hopefully this one is a lot better, huh? (In other words, correct me please! )

[chequita guevara]

Azazel, they've turned the Orcs into Klingons.

FlameFlash, you are correct, it's still needing to remember where every last piece is. Worse, there doesn't seem to be a pause function, so it's definately chaotic. At least StarCraft had a pause button. The CGI animation, though, is fantastic, and the story's quite good. I'm having fun, and I'm not really much of an RTS fan. I kinda thought it was done when Dune II did it. Since then things have only been a prettier version of Dune II.

In other news, glad to see you acknowledge your patheticness, Archais. "Whah, I wanted to argue against Pandemoniak, not everyone else." I'm sorry, but Pandemoniak doesn't own Marxism. Any of us can step forward to defend our ideas. If Wraith or Berzerker stepped in to pick up your slack in defending libertarianism, I wouldn't whine about how I was only responding to you. Either you defned your positions or you tacitly admit your don't know what the f*** you're talking 'bout. We see you've already made your choice.

[Archaic]

I'm not going to be goaded into responding to your things before I said I would. I don't care if it's a "fact of life" that topics in OT get hijacked, Pandemoniak wanted to go Mano-o-mano, and so I'll do that. If other people are going to get involved, fine, but you'll have to give me some time to write out my rebuttals to everything you've said (Admitadly, most of that will be just "Straw-man" or "Hasty Generalisation", along with links to what those terms mean so you can see what fallacy you're comitting, but still.). I have more important things to do than to waste my time arguing on the net with someone having no grounding in either disipline. You'll get your reply, in time. Now see if you can stop whinging about me not replying for a few days. I'm in Uni, I have assignments to hand in.

Pandemoniak, PM or email me when your rebuttal is ready. I'll try to respond to it, and the rest of the things here, within a week of that being posted.

[lucky22]

You go, Archaic. Good luck on those assignments, too.

[chequita guevara]

In other words, you can't take me head on, so you'll set up a strawman to knock down.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Archaic
Pandemoniak, PM or email me when your rebuttal is ready. I'll try to respond to it, and the rest of the things here, within a week of that being posted.

I declare victory!

[chequita guevara]

I'll finish Wong off after I'm down with Warcraft III. I'm sure you're all waiting with baited breath.

[Urban Ranger]

The first time I saw Pandemoniak's post in the Civ 3 forum, I reponded with, "A French version of che!"

I didn't know he's a fellow commie back then

[Az]

Azazel, they've turned the Orcs into Klingons.

so it seems. It's really makes you raise an eyebrow when you have to fight trolls and goblins ,that you were supposedly allied to. Though I really like all of those native critters around. feels sooo.... "minor civilizations".

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
The first time I saw Pandemoniak's post in the Civ 3 forum, I reponded with, "A French version of che!"

I didn't know he's a fellow commie back then

He says he's a Marxist anarchist. . . . At least he's a Marxist.