[Turambar]

I'm still holding out hope that we can take the less retarded path and end up as a Star Trek: TNG society without nuking ourselves into oblivion first.

Seriously though, it is the essence of capitalism at its core.  Start everyone on the same footing, and those who are better will succeed.

[Nuclear1]

The USSR was not an asian country.

*Looks at a map*
 

You can define Asian different ways though.  "Asian" as a physical location, yes, the larger parts of the USSR were on the Asian continent.  Peter the Great irreversibly made Russia much more a European nation than an Asian one, though.

[Scotty]

Granted, but the definitive assertation that the USSR was not an Asian country still makes me laugh. 

[mxlm]

i htink thats more of an asian thing. besides i never said anything about leader worship

Right, I did. And then you said, 'that's not atheism that's communism' and made a comment about Marx being a paranoid bastard. I concluded from this that you were arguing that the sort of cultism I was discussing was, well, communistic. So I wanted you to support that argument. If I misunderstood what you were trying to say, well, never mind.

[Kosh]

Granted, but the definitive assertation that the USSR was not an Asian country still makes me laugh.
 

The majority of the Russian population are white and lives west of the urals. Russia's political and economic centers are all west of the urals, and russian culture has far far more in common with europe than it does with asia. Even the russian language is completely unrelated to any of the asian lanugages. Therefore, the USSR was not an asian country, although it did have asian minorities.

[Liberator]

IIRC, Marx thought that communism would only be successful in an industrialized society, working on finding confirmation on that.

The thing "city folk" keep forgetting, and by "city folk" I mean that live, work and die in an urban environment/educational environment, is that "industrialized" can't exist without a little thing called agriculture.

[Inquisitor]

The thing "city folk" keep forgetting, and by "city folk" I mean that live, work and die in an urban environment/educational environment, is that "industrialized" can't exist without a little thing called agriculture.

The bourgeoisie don't realize that they couldn't survive without the proletariat?

[Liberator]

You mean the farmer couldn't survive without the city slicker to buy his stuff?  That's a load of malarky, with fewer customers the would just grow less.

[Inquisitor]

You need to get a dictionary.

You just spouted (in favor of I might add) a pretty interesting flavor of Marxist communism. The "elite" should realize they only could be there on the backs of the working man.

working man= proletariat, in your example, farmers.

Means of production- in this example, agriculture

That leaves the bourgeoisie to be the "city folk" the cultural elite.

You just definied a class struggle in favor of the working man. Karl Marx would be proud. Karl Rove, less so.

[iamzack]

Damn.

[Ford Prefect]

I lol'd.

[karajorma]

Kara, can I quote you on that elsewhere?

Feel free.

[Inquisitor]

IIRC, Marx thought that communism would only be successful in an industrialized society, working on finding confirmation on that.

This is what I get for not reading up, Marxism is about:

The productive capacity of society is the foundation of society, and as this capacity increases over time the social relations of production, class relations, evolve through this struggle of the classes and pass through definite stages (primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism). The legal, political, ideological and other aspects (ex. art) of society are derived from these production relations as is the consciousness of the individuals of which the society is composed.

So in pure philosophical terms, the productive capacity is broadly defined. You might find scholars and philosophers who would define it more narrowly, but I don't think you can exclude argiculture from the "productive" definition. It certainly is not excluded in communist nations.

Source is wiki, fyi. I read the Communist Manifesto once, probably 20 years ago. Never wanted or needed to go back and re-read it. I probably should, if nothing else than to demonstrate why I am not even close to a communist, regardless of what Glenn and Rush may claim.

-edit-
Project Gutenburg has it, but they seem to be having website issues. I don;t recall it being a particularly long book. Wiki has some excerpts though:

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

And specifically one of the 10 tenets of traditional communism:

Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country

and:

Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

I see that as a merging of ag and industry in the minds of the communist. According to my reading of that, they are the same, they share the same struggles, and are all generally considered proletariat.

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

[General Battuta]

IIRC, Marx thought that communism would only be successful in an industrialized society, working on finding confirmation on that.

The thing "city folk" keep forgetting, and by "city folk" I mean that live, work and die in an urban environment/educational environment, is that "industrialized" can't exist without a little thing called agriculture.

Agriculture is industrialized.

You mean the farmer couldn't survive without the city slicker to buy his stuff?  That's a load of malarky, with fewer customers the would just grow less.

Also, yeah, just wanted to point out that that's exactly the opposite of what Inquisitor said. The farmers are the proletariat, the bourgeoise the city folk.  But I think I'm seconding Inquisitor's correction.