Communism is for babies and tyrants. It is a philosophy devoid of any principle or science and at it's root it is based on a glaring disregard for the truth and it is altogether evil to the core(more on that in a moment).
Capitalism??? Where does it exist in the US? Maybe between me and my drug dealer. But we haven't been a capitalist country for sometime. We live in a mixed economy; a mixture of capitalism and statism, of freedom and controls.
And there can be no compromise between the two; EVER. For any nation with both forms of systems in existence will ultimately disintegrate as it turns into a civil war of pressure groups trying to loot and devour one another. And that is what we are living in now: a system of cannibalism.
In fact, I'd say we are actually closer to a system of communism than capitalism. How, you ask? Every single one of the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto exists in some form in the U.S. today; starting with the graduated income tax, onwards. I could spell them all out for you guys but would it really make you feel good?
Anyway, Karl Marx based his philosophy on BULLSHIT. Marx may have lived a scholar's life; but in reality he wasn't really a scholar at all and he certainly wasn't scientific. In fact, in all that matters Marx was anti-scientific.
Marx was an eschatological writer from start to finish. The apocalyptic vision of an immense, impending catastrophe on the existing system is through all of his life's work; starting with his poetry. Marx's concept of a Doomsday, whether in its poetic version or later his economic one, is an artistic and not a scientific vision. It was always in Marx's mind, and he worked backwards from it, seeking the evidence that made it inevitable, rather than forward to it, from objectively examined data.
Anti-Semitism is also at the very root of Marxism. He was a jew himself, who then converted to a Protestant, and then secularized. While engaging one day in jubiliant student cafe anti-Semitism, he disagreed that the anti-social nature of the Jew was religious in origin and could be remedied by tearing the Jew away from his faith. In Marx's view, the evil was social and economic. He called money and practical self-interest their God and their profane basis and that "the god of the jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world". So it was necessary to abolish the existing preconditions and the kind of money activities which spawned people of their ilk.
So he broadened his philosophy over the next few years, ultimately deciding that the evil element in society, the agents of the usurious money-power, weren't just the Jews but the bourgeois class as a whole.
The problem with Marx's views is that they have nothing whatsover the fuck to do with the real world. Marx had an ambivalent attitude towards facts. He spent entire decades of his life collecting facts. But these were the facts to be found in libraries, Blue Book facts. The kinds of facts which didn't interest Marx were the facts to be discovered by examining the world and its people with his own eyes and ears. But nobody could ever get him out of the fucking library. Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle who was a successful business man; but Marx only visited him a few times to borrow money(he had a real problem managing his own money). The other was Engels, but Marx declined an invitation from him to visit a cotten mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine, or other place of industry in the whole of his life.
In fact Marx despised and was openly and outwardly hostile against his fellow revolutionaries who had roots and experience in the workplace; or on any leaders who had secured a large following of working men by preaching practical solutions to actual problems of work and wages, rather than doctrinaire revolution.
Marx was highly deceptive. He only chose facts that would only confirm his theories and he would often misuse sources and misquote for effect. He drastically misquoted W.E. Gladstone and Adam Smith. Engels collaborated in the deceptions; though Marx was the more audacious forger.
It all basically amounts to nothing more than political polemics rather than anything empirical.
Karl Marx simply cannot be trusted though. His crimes against the truth fall on numerous heads. First, he uses out-of-date material because up-to-date material does not support his case. Second, he selects certain industries, where conditions were particularly bad, as typical of capitalism. His thesis was that capitalism produces ever-worsening conditions; the more capital employed, the more badly the workers had to be treated to secure adequate returns. The evidence he uses to justify this comes almost entirely from small, inefficient, undercapitalized firms in archaic industries which in most cases were pre-capitalist. In many of the conditions he cites(e.g. baking), conditions were bad precisely because the firm had not been able to afford to introduce machinery, since it lacked capital. In effect, Marx is dealing with pre-capitalist conditions, and ignoring the truth which stared him in the face:*zing* the more capital, the less suffering.
What Marx could not or would not get, because he made no effort to understand how industry worked, was that from the very dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the most efficient manufacturers, who had ample access to capital, habitually favored better conditions for their workforce; so conditions improved, and because conditions improved, the workers failed to rise, as Marx predicted they would. The prophet was thus confounded. What emerges from reading Marx is Marx's fundamental failure to understand capitalism. He failed precisely because he was unscientific- he would not investigate the facts himself, or use objectively the facts investigated by others. From start to finish, not just the Communist Manifesto, but all of his work reflects a disregard for truth which at times amounts to contempt. That is the primary reason why Marxism, as a system, cannot produce the results claimed for it; and to call it 'scientific' is preposterous.
And besides being entirely based on lies and hatred, Marxism is evil in and of itself. One can always opt out of capitalism; but with every form of socialism, one HAS to live that way. There is no choice. And you are living under a system of slavery, any way you slice it.
I guess in short, I would rather live in a society which treats children as adults rather than treat adults as children.
So, CAPITALISM WINS.
