Re: Revised version of Re:Understanding Ed (previous version garbled

Spector:

>Life, and particularly science, is about sorting out the confusion, not
just
>saying that all  causes seem to be important and it is just "so confusing"
>to sort it all out. Does anyone really believe that more "strongmen"  were
>set up by the USSR than by the Western Capitalist Powers? Can anyone
>seriously compare Castro's Regime, with its perhaps 500--1000 (I doubt it
>but I'm bending the argument the other way)  executions in 40 years  (a
>proportion that Texas is approaching)  to the US-funded regimes in El
>Salvador (80,000 killed by the pro-U.S. forces) or Guatemala (100,000
>murdered) to Chile (30,000)   (by the way, everyone's favorite "Market
>Economist" Milton Friedman had many pleasant luches with the military
>dictator murderers of Chile as he advised them on how to impoverish the
>"less than free to choose" militarily oppressed Chilean people), Indonesia
>(500,000) and do I have to go on and on and on, from U.S. corporate
>profiteering from apartheid for 30 years to   "strong men" in Brazil,
>Philippines, Iran, Taiwan, South Korea,  a war in Vietnam that killed
>millions and destabilized all of Indochina.  And this is without discussing
>the deaths from hunger and disease, deaths which are ENFORCED by the
>inability of the people to organize "democratically" for better lives
>because they would have to come up against CIA trained and armed military
>forces from such democratic institutions as the School for the Americas.
>(And as I mentioned in earlier posts, with the support of many political
>parties which call themselves "socialist" including the British Labour
>Party, the French, German, Italian socialist parties, etc.)

I'm trying to understand this.  You seem to argue that before the advent of
capitalism and commodity production, people did not kill each other in mass
numbers.  Then along came the capitalists, and human nature somehow changed
for the worse.  I seem to recall that a lot of people, including Jews and
"infidels" living in Europe, were slaughtered during the Crusades.  I
believe those would be considered pre-capitalist times, or certainly times
before capitalists formed a dominant class.  I also seem to recall reading
that the conquest of Mexico by Cortez was much easier than it should have
been because tributary Indian states hated the Aztecs for the atrocities
they had committed.  My point is that wherever you have exploitative
relations, whether based on mode of production, religion, hereditary rights,
or whatever, there is always the possibility of widespread dissent and
wholesale repression.

>Blaming it on a few bad people, or on some flaw in human nature provides a
>very quick way to find an answer that is not disturbing and allows the
>system to keep rolling on, but those two "bottom line answers" can be found
>in any high school philosophy club. While philosophy has its place,
>hopefully, those on WSN do try to employ some research, some data, and some
>analysis, preferably interdisciplinary history, politics, economics,
>culture..... I may not agree with everything written by such writers as AG


I would certainly agree that blaming a few bad people is a very wrong
approach.  But I really don't understand social analysis as a matter of
finding who to blame.  It's more a matter of finding how things came about.
Usually, it isn't by conspiracy or misguided take-over urges, though as in
the case of the CIA, these may be present.  I recently did some research on
the German Peasants' War of 1525.  A large number of different strands
converged to produce that brief but bloody conflict in which some 90,000
people were estimated to have died -- demographic change initiated by the
Black Death; the disintegration of feudal society; the need for agrarian
reform; religious reform (the Protestant Reformation); millennial angst (the
coming of the end of time); exploitative class relations; consolidation of
powers by territorial princes; and the growth of displaced urban and rural
populations.  Some of these things were more important than others, but
assigning weights to them would be very difficult.

>imprisoned, winners and losers in various trade exchanges, military
>interventions etc. Not just GDP or how well the upper 10% are doing. You
>want to analyze the successess/failures of the old USSR? Let's have some
>data. Let's also cast a critical eye towards data that comes from
defectors,
>pro-Nazis, and CIA agents -- data that is so outrageously self-serving as
to
>defy our understanding of how society works (such as numbers like 50
million
>murdered by Stalin, etc.).  Want to discuss the civil war/famine in the
>Ukraine in the early 1930's? Fine. Let's also examine famine in the
>capitalist world, India, China, Turkey, etc. during the early 1930's.   The
>failure of the pro-capitalists (and also some of the socialists, by the
way)
>to seriously address the massive crimes caused by capitalism-imperialism
>against the working class, especially in the so-called "Third World"
>seriously weakens the credibility of all their arguments in favor of
>capitalism.


I believe I used a figure of 20 to 60 million lives lost in the USSR during
the Stalin era.  I must admit I have no proof, and it is most doubtful that
a number could be established.  My estimate is based on conversations I had
with Russian academics when I spent a month in Moscow in 1995.  I would
agree that large numbers of people have also died elsewhere, but doubt that
this was solely due to "massive crimes caused by capitalism-imperialism
against the working class".  My point is that people have had a variety of
reasons for killing each other since time immemorial.  They have killed each
other even when no conceivable or understandable reason could be found.

>I don't think that the debate about whether capitalism can ever work is
even
>a serious debate anymore. I really do believe that Marx and others settled
>that a hundred years ago. Capitalism is based on certain mechanisms that do
>lead to collapses and wars, in uneven ways and irregular times, but they
>eventually do come to pass, and when people, especially the working class,
>come to realize that and organize against the essence of capitalism --
>commodity production and the profit system, then the world will pass out of
>this only several-hundred-year-old stage of world history.


Personally, I'm very disappointed with the working class.  Nobody seems to
want to belong to it anymore, at least where I live.  Kids all want to be
computer whizzes and millionaires by the time they're thirty, big time
capitalists in their own right.  Bill Gates is the model, not Che.  Kids
that don't want to computer whizzes want to become MBAs so that they can
boss the computer whizzes around.  Displays of wealth, such as SUVs and
other large automobiles, have again become commonplace.  And, as they did in
Charles Dickens' day, the poorest of the poor are again respectfully lining
up at food banks, although you sometimes see them buying lottery tickets.
You never know when that million might come in!

Ed Weick