(Part 2) Best products from r/DebateaCommunist

We found 21 comments on r/DebateaCommunist discussing the most recommended products. We ran sentiment analysis on each of these comments to determine how redditors feel about different products. We found 70 products and ranked them based on the amount of positive reactions they received. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.

Top comments mentioning products on r/DebateaCommunist:

u/zeldornious · 1 pointr/DebateaCommunist

Have you read Fatal Purity? it may address a revolution that came over a century before the Bolsheviks seized power but it tells something that is endemic with revolutions after it.

Now as to your points, Berkman does state that the Bolsheviks believe a state to be necessary in order to fend off "counter-revolutionaries". However, this is where Bakunin, a contemporary of Marx, disagreed with Marx himself. If you would like, we could debate this in its own post so it is not buried deep in a tail of comments.
However, Berkman is giving an account of how things progressed in Russia while he was alive. He and Goldman were in Russia while Lenin was alive and both decided to leave after the Kronstadt Rebellion. What is presented in the four chapters I cited can be thought of as a slimming down of this book.

I hope I have assuaged you from using the phrase "Not a historical fact" about Berkman and his thoughts on the Bolsheviks. Thank you for your time.

u/amaxen · 1 pointr/DebateaCommunist

To be sure. And it's not a new observation. In the forties, a famous book by ex-communist intellectuals was titled 'Communism: the God that Failed'. In it, they described both why they became dedicated Communists and then later why they became dedicated anti-Communists.

>Once the renunciation has been made, the mind, instead of operating freely, becomes a servant of a higher and unquestioned purpose. To deny the truth is an act of service. This of course is why it is useless to discuss any aspect of politics with a Communist. Any intellectual contact you have with him is a challenge to his fundamental faith."

u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/DebateaCommunist

My favorite free market anti-capitalist alive today is Roderick T. Long.

Try checking out the book "Markets Not Capitalism". Here's a PDF of the book available free online

It's a collection of essays from various individualist market anarchists (including Long)

You may also enjoy Long's lecture: "How (and Why) to be a Free-Market Radical Leftist

u/kodiakus · 15 pointsr/DebateaCommunist

You should read about leveling mechanisms, redistribution systems, and reciprocity. The idea that humans started out as individuals that conglomerated and were shackled by governments is a false one that has roots in 18th century myths and assumptions (which still pervade economics to this day). People have always been social by nature, contributing towards the group's well-fare. Individualism is a recent invention, and the monetary incentive is as well. Barter economies never existed in as wide-spread or as comprehensive a fashion as economists assume, there was no natural transition between the direct trade of goods to the use of money to facilitate this trade. Money came quickly and at the hands of governments. Mutual gift giving would better describe the exchange of goods taking place internally within societies.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/what-is-debt-%E2%80%93-an-interview-with-economic-anthropologist-david-graeber.html


http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.144016

http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~wmmaurer/bio/Maurer-AR.pdf

http://ethnografix.blogspot.com/2010/03/anthropologyeconomics_02.html

http://www.amazon.com/Barter-Exchange-Value-Anthropological-Approach/dp/052140682X

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_anthropology#Critics_of_the_Approaches

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_economy

u/StarTrackFan · 2 pointsr/DebateaCommunist

Have you read Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness? It's an neat little essay about the importance of leisure time and limiting work. The original collection it was published in contains a lot of interesting essays, including "The Case for Socialism"

u/FreakingTea · 3 pointsr/DebateaCommunist

I'm wondering if this book would answer that for you. I just ordered it myself, because it looks pretty fascinating. Hopefully I'll be able to discuss this stuff better once I read it.

u/jebuswashere · 2 pointsr/DebateaCommunist

/u/thomashc addressed your comment very well, so I'll just add a couple of books you might want to read to get an idea of how actual libertarian communist societies function. First, Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, to get an idea of how an anarcho-syndicalist/anarcho-communist society could function. Second, The Zapatisa Reader, edited by Tom Hayden, contains numerous primary sources in the form of news articles and interviews, as well as critical academic analyses, of a libertarian communist movement that is both more recent and much longer lasting than anarchist Catalonia. It provides a good comparative study.

u/mhl67 · 1 pointr/DebateaCommunist

The major advantages of a socialist economy are the elimination of overproduction as well as giving complete information to planners. Capitalism has to struggle with overproduction and incomplete information as a result of them operating as competitors. That's the major difference.

Industrialization under the czars was not really qualitatively different from Stalin's industrialization except for the fact it was extremely patchy, concentrated, and relatively marginal; as well as the fact that the industrialization was almost exclusively to build up military capabilities. And yes, I'm aware it ruined much of agriculture. That was relatively intentional, the motivation for the 1932 famine was to export grain in return for rapid industrialization. Which he succeeded in.

I'd recommend you read The Revolution Betrayed, and The Contradictions of Real Socialism to understand the actual problems with the Stalinist socialist model.

u/veldurak · 3 pointsr/DebateaCommunist

I was very recently reading Amusing Ourselves To Death, which is a great book about how the transfer from print to television changes our discourse. It explains how entertainment is put above all else, and the relevent is increasingly lost in a sea of trivial. I'd highly recommend it.

u/anticapitalist · 2 pointsr/DebateaCommunist

> istory class which I can see is unaccurate now.

Yes, very.

> Would you know a good source to learn up non biased good history?

I don't think there's non-biased history. Everyone is biased.

If you're interested in US history, this is great:

http://www.amazon.com/A-Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0060838655

As for Russian history, most of the stuff that's different (from Western TV) is in Russian.

u/DickieAnderson · 1 pointr/DebateaCommunist

Forgive me for recommending reading material to someone named "readingsucks", but Erich Fromm's The Sane Society answers this prompt so well it can't go without mention. As I recall, this is quite a good article on the subject too.

u/gliberty · 2 pointsr/DebateaCommunist

I don't have time to read carefully and reply in full at present but right away I see the history you present is flawed. You say:

>Second, the Duma (the Parliament which had no elected officials and included no Socialists) formed themselves, seized the palace, and declared that they would rule as a Provisional Government

This is simply incorrect history. The Duma had been a semi-parliamentary system (weak, power limited by the Tsar) for decades. There were 2 or 3 major socialist parties in the Duma in the years leading up 1917 over several congresses - the first through the 4th Dumas - it is 3 if you count Mensheviks and Bolsheviks as in separate parties, which they should be by 1917.
At least 2 of these 3 socialist groups were represented in the Duma during most of its congresses. The large Socialist Revolutionary party, or SR, made up mostly of peasants and also soldiers, which was basically agrarian-socialist and not Marxist particpitated either alone or in a coalition like the Labour Group. And the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks participated but only one at a time, when the other would boycott, they sometimes refused to participate - both Bol. and Men. boycotted, taking turns, because the Duma system, they argued (correctly) meant they were bullied by the Tsar, and there was a highly slanted voting system which benefited the propertied classes. Hence they were disadvantaged and therefore vastly underrepresented in the Duma relative to the trend of opinion among the people. This may have been true. But, it is not true that the Duma had no socialists in 1917:

Seats held in Imperial Dumas

  • Party First Duma Second Duma Third Duma Fourth Duma
  • Russian Social Democratic Party 18 (Mensheviks) 47 (Mensheviks) 19 (Bolsheviks) 15 (Bolsheviks)
  • Socialist-Revolutionary Party – 37 – –
  • Labour group 136 104 13 10
  • Progressist Party 27 28 28 41
  • Constitutional Democratic party 179 92 52 57
  • Non-Russian National Groups 121 – 26 21
  • Centre Party – – – 33
  • Octobrist Party 17 42 154 95
  • Nationalists 60 93 26 22
  • Rightists 8 10 147 154
  • TOTAL 566 453 465 448

    In 1917, the large SR party and the Bolsheviks had seats in the Duma.

    See also, for example, pages 250-255 in Adam Ulam's The Bolsheviks where Lenin's boycotting of the Duma is explained at length.
u/caferrell · 2 pointsr/DebateaCommunist

I am afraid that it is not de Soto's entire book, but rather a review of it. The review is interesting.

The book is available at amazon

u/redryan · 3 pointsr/DebateaCommunist

Actually, a former classmate of mine did his masters thesis on this very topic which was just published in book form. The empirical documentation of capitalist genocide in this book, I would add, is pretty airtight.