A world beyond Capitalism

@ArishMell With the whole equating it to racism and misogyny thing, it's because these type of people associate "capitalism" with the inevitable suffering of being. And this suffering can be alleviated if we give power to an all knowing government, if we try to overcome our original sins of racism etc if we tithe a portion of our income to this structure etc. It has so many parallels with religion, but its a lot to go into.

@ArishMell Umm citation needed.


Even western studies of the subject support this.


I mean capitalism was the system that made slavery economically viable again in the modern age. Racism was also largely manufactured to create a justification for capitalist colonialism

That is not a coincidence.

Gender equality was also largely better in the soviet bloc. It certainly was not perfect but it was better.


In the early 90s the former West Germany saw a rise in women in meaningful positions because former GDR women were not content to be secretaries.

These are all things that have been extensively studied.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Fair enough: I do agree that the Communist nations were more equal at least at work if not socially, and the slave-trade by Britain, some other European countries and America was certainly founded on sheer racism; but slavery, racism and mysogyny are by no means new, nor confined to those countries or societies.

Nowadays the European countries generally do have strong employee-protection laws against intolerance by sex, sexuality, race or religion; but they are all very much capitalist economies.

A good deal of the legislation though, was fought for by the trade-unions; and it's debatable if some of it would not have existed without the unions - and these are unions that on the whole are on the left-wing of the British and European L-R spectrum, but have no truck with Communism.

(I am still a union member, but now via one of its Retired Members' Groups.)

@ArishMell You are seriously claiming the radical trade unions had no ties to Marxists? Oh boy. Guess they don't teach labour history even in unions anymore. lol

@ArishMell Anti communist unions largely only came into prominence after the Red Scare and resulting purges.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow IN Canada and the USA perhaps, but apart from some notorious examples of exploitative leaders and disaffected workers in the 1960s, most UK trade-union people were staunch Labour supporters (it was their Party) who avoided the Communist Party.

They wanted things like the NHS, free education, the Welfare State, and most supported nationalising major industries and public services in the mid-20C; but did not want the country to be a Soviet-style state.

There were early-20C union members in a few places in the UK who were attracted to Communism to the extent of forming Party branches, but it was never a large number and the Communist Party has always remained a small, fringe thing. As far as I know it never held a Parliamentary seat even if it ever fielded candidates.

On the other hand I don't think most British unions were "anti-Communist" as such, they just didn't want the ideology.

The Red Scare was quite different Over Here. We all feared the Soviet Union and the threat of WW3, oh yes, but we did not proscribe scientists and entertainers for left-wing views. The Communists and their ilk were probably under surveillance, and membership of their Party may well have barred you from certain areas of employment; but we did not have anything like the USA's "Un-American Activities Committee" kangaroo-courts. (An ironical policy if ever there was!)

@ArishMell Thank you for proving my point. The 60s was 20 plus years into the red scare and labour purges...and yes that includes the UK.


MI5 even had it's own little branch for that purpose.



Again, this was 20 years after the anti communist scares and purges.




I would again suggest you look at how MI5 dealt with Marxists in the UK.

Many leftists in all of the west renounced the USSR because they were afraid of being locked up as a foreign agent.


And the McCarthy show trials are irrelevant because we are talking about radical trade unions not an actor saying the wrong thing.

@pianoplayingsteve lol no. What government exists under Anarcho-Communism? What state?

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Those reforms in the quote were introduced in the late 1940s, as was large-scale industrial nationalising (the collieries, railways, public utilities, etc.)

Aneurin Bevan (Labour MP) based his NHS proposal on what had been already established in the colliery towns of South Wales, basically community, not commercial, medical insurance plans.

Free education in Britain was earlier still, dating back to the 19C whose latter half was marked by a large swathe of vital social reforms, including the start of employee-protection and workplace safety laws; and the introduction of home-building standards.

All before the height of the Cold War; and nothing to do with Communism!

.

The show-trials in the USA were relevant as a contrast. They were of so many actors and academics, not only radical trades-unionists. People simply having left-wing views, not necessarily any political ambitions. In the UK the far-Left was kept under surveillance and your activities could bar you from sensitive areas of employment; but it was never made basically illegal just to express left-wing views. The Communist Party of Great Britain continued to exist, and the CND was very active in the 1960s.

I recall a Police Officer in the 1980s telling me the hard-Left were more dangerous to the country than the hard-Right though because they were far more organised and systematic, some were being groomed by the Kremlin, and some individuals undeniably had manoeuvred themselves into self-serving union officerships in an era of generally poor industrial relations. However, like all "Western" countries the UK did have agents for the USSR in its midst, and properly, MI5 was hunting them.

Their far-Right opponents tended to be merely unpleasant rabbles like the British National Party; and their ideology was hardly likely to be popular in a nation that had only recently recovered from having been very closely involved in a war against it.

Even then, from either side, no-one was arrested unless they broke existing laws anyway, including of course treasonous acts like passing secrets.

Since then, some organisations have been proscribed by law in the UK but their aims and ideas for gaining them have to be very unpleasant indeed.

The "Far" spectrum in Europe generally has moved though. Since the end of the USSR, there has been a rise in far-Right ideology even in one or two governments in countries you might think would abjure any sort of dictatorship.

@ArishMell I think what you are missing is the scares and purges I am talking about were already decades into the process by the start of the official cold war.

Most started before the Russian civil war even concluded. You can still find pictures of "report commies" scare pamphlets that had variations all across the empire as early as 1920.

@ArishMell You also kind of confirmed one of my earlier points that alot of communists were forced out of unions and politics because being a Marxist at all made you a potential target and could be labelled a soviet spy. The truth of it was entirely irrelevant because even the suggestion would make you a social pariah.

The same shit happened years later with Muslims falsely accused of wrong doing.