Live data from Hacker News

Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

isi.org

111–112 of 112 posts

Re: Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal property is private property. The term "personal property" is mostly used by Marxists.

That is not correct, the term is used by all kinds of socialists. You may not care about the difference in general, but denying it is not helpful when discussing socialism. You're trying to refute the claim that private property (in the socialist sense) is problematic by defending private property (in the liberal sense), which doesn't make sense because these are two different concepts.

Before I address your point, I'll clarify that I want to use correct/standard definitions, not definitions only understood by small subsets of the population.

Now to your point: private property intended for personal use, which socialist ideology claims is not problematic, is the direct progenitor of private property used for other purposes, like earning an income for the owner from being rented out, or from being utilized in an enterprise that employs other people to operate the private property.

The differences between private property intended for personal use, and private property intended for business or commercial use, are completely superficial with respect to the basic principles that society operates on.

Re: Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

#112
post #90

Mind experiment: In the last paragraph of dang's top post replace "communism" witch "nazism" and "Engels" and "Marx" with "Hitler" and "Mussolini". How would you feel about it? There are probably millions of people in the USA who barely escaped with their lives from vile communist regimes and yet the idea of communism is still entertained as some misunderstood noble thing. Until there will be "Nuremberg trials" equiv…

> Mind experiment: In the last paragraph of dang's top post replace "communism" witch "nazism" and "Engels" and "Marx" with "Hitler" and "Mussolini". How would you feel about it? Similarly to how I react to replacing "communism" with "[economic] liberalism" and "Marx" with "Rand" and "Engels" with "the Chicago boys". Unsurprisingly, changing the words in a text changes its meaning. > There are probably millions of pe…

Communism and nazism (national socialism) are two sides of the same coin. Both rooted in the same collectivist ideology where life on an individual is meaningless, always ready to be sacrificed for the "greater good". Both have a class of people who are undesirable (nacism: inferior people, communism: rich and educated) and need to be exterminated. Nazism left behind millions of dead people and communism tens of millions of dead people. I have no idea how you can compare economic liberalism to either communism or nazism.
Post reply on HN