Capitalism -v- Communism & all the other social...isms

[nomme]

What do people make of this?:

 

(Taken from http://www.cat.org.au/dwu/moneytrk.html)

 

The Great Money Trick

 

Taken from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist by Robert Tressel

 

"Money is the real cause of poverty," said Owen.

 

"Prove it," repeated Crass.

 

"Money is the cause of poverty because it is the device by which those who are too lazy to work are enabled to rob the workers of the fruits of their labour."

 

"Prove it," said Crass.

 

Owen slowly folded up the piece of newspaper he had been reading and put it in his pocket.

 

"All right," he replied. "I'll show you how the Great Money Trick is worked."

 

Owen opened his dinner basket and took from it two slices of bread, but as these where not sufficient, he requested that anyone who had some bread left should give it to him. They gave him several pieces, which he placed in a heap on a clean piece of paper, and, having borrowed the pocket knives of Easton, Harlow and Philpot, he addressed the, as follows:

 

"These pieces of bread represent the raw materials which exist naturally in and on the earth for the use of mankind; they were not made by any human being, but were created for the benefit and sustenance of all, the same as were the air and the light of the sun."

 

"Now," continued Owen, "I am a capitalist; or rather I represent the landlord and capitalist class. That is to say, all these raw materials belong to me. It does not matter for our present arguement how I obtained possession of them, the only thing that matters now is the admitted fact that all the raw materials which are necessary for the production of the necessaries of life are now the property of the landlord and capitalist class. I am that class; all these raw materials belong to me."

 

"Now you three represent the working class. You have nothing, and, for my part, although I have these raw materials, they are of no use to me. What I need is the things that can be made out of these raw materials by work; but I am too lazy to work for me. But first I must explain that I possess something else beside the raw materials. These three knives represent all the machinery of production; the factories, tools, railways, and so forth, without which the necessaries of life cannot be produced in abundance. And these three coins" - taking three half pennies from his pocket - "represent my money, capital."

 

"But before we go any further," said Owen, interrupting himself, "it is important to remember that I am not supposed to be merely a capitalist. I represent the whole capitalist class. You are not supposed to be just three workers, you represent the whole working class."

 

Owen proceeded to cut up one of the slices of bread into a number of little square blocks.

 

"These represent the things which are produced by labour, aided by machinery, from the raw materials. We will suppose that three of these blocks represent a week's work. We will suppose that a week's work is worth one pund."

 

Owen now addressed himself to the working class as represented by Philpot, Harlow and Easton.

 

"You say that you are all in need of employment, and as I am the kind-hearted capitalist class I am going to invest all my money in variuos industries, so as to give you plenty of work. I shall pay each of you one pound per week, and a week's work is that you must each produce three of these square blocks. For doing this work you will each recieve your wages; the money will be your own, to do as you like with, and the things you produce will of course be mine to do as I like with. You will each take one of these machines and as soon as you have done a week's work, you shall have your money."

 

The working classes accordingly set to work, and the capitalist class sat down and watched them. As soon as they had finished, they passed the nine little blocks to Owen, who placed them on a piece of paper by his side and paid the workers their wages.

 

"These blocks represent the necessaries of life. You can't live without some of these things, but as they belong to me, you will have to buy them from me: my price for these blocks is,one pound each."

 

As the working classes were in need of the necessaries of life and as they could not eat, drink or wear the useless money, they were compelled to agree to the capitalist's terms. They each bought back, and at once consumed, one-third of the produce of their labour. The capitalist class also devoured two of the square blocks, and so the net result of the week's work was that the kind capitalist had consumed two pounds worth of things produced by the labour of others, and reckoning the squares at their market value of one pound each, he had more than doubled his capital, for he still possessed the three poinds in money and in addition four pounds worth of goods. As for the working classes, Philpot, Harlow and Easton, having each consumed the pound's worth of necessaries they had bought with their wages, they were agin in precisely the same condition as when they had started work - they had nothing.

 

This process was repeated several times; for each weeks work the producers were paid their wages. They kept on working and spending all their earnings. The kind-hearted capitalist consumed twice as much as any one of them and his pool of wealth continually increased. In a little while, reckoning the little squares at their market value of one pound each, he was worth about one hundred pounds, and the working classes were still in the same condition as when they began, and were still tearing into their work as if their lives depended on it.

 

After a while the rest of the crowd began to laugh, and their meriment increased when the kind-hearted capitalist, just after having sold a pound's worth of necessaries to each of his workers, suddenly took their tools, the machinery of production, the knives, away from them, and informed them that as owing to over production all his store-houses were glutted with the necessaries of life, he had decided to close down the works.

 

"Well, and wot the bloody 'ell are we to do now ?" demanded Philpot.

 

"That's not my business," replied the kind-hearted capitalist. "I've paid your wages, and provided you with plenty of work for a long time past. I have no more work for you to do at the present. Come round again in a few months time and I'll see what I can do."

 

"But what about the necessaries of life?" Demanded Harlow. "we must have something to eat."

 

"Of course you must," replied the capitalist, affably; "and I shall be very pleased to sell you some." "But we ain't got no bloody money!"

 

"Well, you cant expect me to give you my goods for nothing! You didn't work for nothing, you know. I paid you for your work and you should have saved something: you should have been thrifty like me. Look how I have got on by being thrifty!"

 

The unemployed looked blankly at each other, but the rest of the crowd only laughed; and then the three unemployed began to abuse the kind-hearted capitalist, demanding that he should give them some of the necessaries of life that he had piled up in his warehouses, or to be allowed to work and produce some more for their own needs; and even threated to take some of the things by force if he did not comply with their demands. But the kind-hearted capitalist told them not to be insolent, and spoke to them about honesty, and said if they were not carefule he would have their faces battered in for them by the police, or if necessary he would call out the military and have them shot down like dogs, the same as he had done before at Featherstone and Belfast.

[oxbeast]

Here is capitalism

[Hodge]

Just got a spare 2 minutes at work at the moment, so don't have enough time to expatiate, but couldn't the ancient Inca society be viewed as a pretty successful communist society? Athough the culture predates modern communist theories!

[oxbeast]

The Inka culture cannot be described as communist in any way. Granted, they did not have currency in the conventional sense of the word. But they were a massive, aggressive, expanding empire, ruling over many peoples. Everything was run by the Inka, the heriditery emperor. The whole economy was geared towards tribute, patronage, sacrifice to gods and class. The Inka managed to build their empire with relatively few wars by sending high born daughters to marry local rulers, and therefore perpetuate the ruling dynasty.

 

There was a good deal of collective action though, like men had to spend a certain proportion of the year in the Army, mostly spent building and maintaining roads.

 

The society that seems to me to most honestly approximate communism is that of the !Kung San of southern Africa.

 

http://kyky.essortment.com/kungsanpeople_rftw.htm

[commie pig]

There are various examples of what marx described as 'primitive communism' where there was a fairly general level of equlity with food work etc being shared out. Unfortunately, because they were all primitive, there wasn't actually enough food to share out sometimse, and so elites developed, leading to modern class society.

 

Examples of 'really existing communism'? Tragically i don't think there are any today. No on, other than a few lunatic Stalinists (and, uhh, Arthur Scargill) believes North Korea is socialist/communist. Cuba is probably the closest thing going, and it has more than its fair share of deeply unpleasant aspects to it - especially the treatment of gay and lesbian people (slightly dropped lately, but only to the kind of levels that, well, that tories over here generally approve of). But you can't seriously compare living in Cuba with Living in the UK - if you want to draw comparisons, Jamaica or Haiti would be better (in terms of economic development as well as geography). There i think you'll find that basic human rights are better served in Cuba - as said, there far higher levels of literacy and health care, lower crime etc. And thats without even taking into consideration the dire effects that the US blockade has had on the Cuban economy.

 

btw - as to the Us limits onnumbers accepted, wonder if that's anything to do with castro emptying the jails a few years back, and allowing all of them to migrate. The US were pretty keen to stop there 'we welcome you all' policy then. And you had to laugh.

 

Examples of 'communism in action' have existed tho - the Spanish Civil war as mentioned earlier (I consider myself a left communist, and so wouldn't really bother distinguishing those politics from the best of those of anarchists) and in the first year after the Russian revolution, where a combination of circumstances (17 invading armies, economic backwardness, failings in the structures and theories of the Bolshevik Party) meant that its achievements were thwarted and slowly but surely over-turned (with Stalin finally putting a river of blood between the new regime and that ushered in in October 1917) and it turned into USSR plc.

 

There have breen more recent examples too - indeed across South Yorkshire (and many other area's) we saw examples of communism in practise when whole communities came together to defend the miners and their communities against attack. The spirit of solidarity then is a fine example of the strength and power that we have working together rather than as individuals fighting against each other. Tragically the miners' eventual defeat meant that that kind of solidarity has been pushed off the agenda in the following 20 years, so that now we have a far more selfish society, and all too often an isolated and insular one.

[chem1st]

In this context they have no additional value, or rather they have the same value as all the other 'worker bees' who perform equally important, but less politically sensitive jobs.

 

I am not belittling them for a second, in the same way that I would not belittle a refuse collector or an incinerator operator.

However, they are still 'worker bees, and there needs to be a 'queen bee' in all hives. That's just how it is I'm afraid.

 

There's no point you bigging them up, because it's irrelevant in this context. You cannot replace the board of your pension fund managers with a bunch of nurses. They both do important jobs. Just like you don’t replace insurance clerks with brain surgeons. Like it or not, you need those well paid senior people in the myriad of organisations that they serve.

 

 

Quote them all you like. There were a small handful of people in a single company. That does nothing whatsoever to undermine the capitalist economic model of the rest of the world. To say anything else is rather disingenuous and serves only to make political capital.

 

Please can we start another thread Abdul? This has nothing to do with voting Labour. You start the thread, and I will transfer all these posts into it.

 

Who knows eh, they might have managed it better, to be honest I'd be surprised if they didn't.