- Capitalism and Alternatives -

Is this poster completely nuts?

Posted by: Nikhil Jaikumar ( DSA, MA, USA ) on October 05, 1999 at 14:22:19:

In Reply to: It might be nutty posted by Frenchy on October 03, 1999 at 20:06:35:

:
: : That would answer some of those questions. Since one tend's to believe no other alternatives may take the place of the existing order, promoting this is the only progress humanity will ever make.

: : Now that is nutty.

: It might be nutty, but the whole world is slowly shifting from really nutty ideas like 'worker's utopia's' and 'scientific man' to democracies based on Capitalism. Nobody is saying it is perfect, but just that it leaves no bodys in it's wake like Socialism/Communism.

Are you completely out of your mind? have you forgotten the 10 million Congolese murdered by Leopold II of belgium in the name of private enterprise? How about the 250,000 Mayan Indians shot or burned alive to make Central America safe for capitalism? Let's move on to the 1.2 million Timorese, chinese, communists, liberals and animists murdered in their beds by the Indonesians. Or perhaps the 30,000 Nicaraguan civilians who often saw their children disembowled or their wives raped or their husbands castrated before being executed themselves. Let's then consider the full 40% of the Namibian population murdered by the Germans to make room for capitalist ranches. Then stop for a moment to dwell on teh 40 million children each eyar who die of starvation fr lack of medical care (after all, most of the victims of 'Stalinism' in China and the Soviet Union died of famines, as well; those who cause an artificial shortage of food, as the Stalinists and the Capitalists both ahve, bear moral responsibility). After that, we can go on to Brazil, where 84% of teh native Amerindinas were callously murdered, amnd teh rest largely enslavesd, by rubber and timber comapnies. Don't forget the later history of Brazil, during which beggars and homeless children were put to death routinely by policemen in the pay of bourgeois shopkeepers. Or Uruguay, or the DR, or KMT China, or South africa, or Chile, or the Philippines, or Batista's Cuba, or any number of other capitalist tyrannies. Evenm in teh 'advaanced capitalisms'. the history is written in blood; it was merely 100 years ago that the US ended its genocide of the Native Americans and its dirty war against Emilio Aguinaldo; a mere 80 years since the British government massacred nearly 400 civilians in the Jallianwalla Bagh, a mere 40 years since the French murdered and tortured teh Algerians.

Don't amke me laugh, please. you wouldn't think that the detah tolls of Maoist China and the soviet union (neitehr one held up as a triumph of communsim by anyone here I might add) could be surpassed very easily; but capiatlism seems to beaten tehir death toll hands down.

Oh, and by the way, capitalism and democracy are incompatible in acse you were wondering. One of them is predicated on human equality and on equal access to the law and to social goods, while the otehr is based on inbequality and hierarchy. Go think about it for a moment.


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