[Zhukov]

You're right in part with your first caustic comment. How many people HAVE read every single god damn volume of Das Kapital? How many of those few have grasped even part of it? The point of it is that people are disenchanted with how things are being run, and might make a comment like "Marx is still valid!" without meaning anything beyond "Fuck this shit".

"No material comforts" means that they didn't have a huge choice at the supermarket, or many TV shows to watch, or fashionable clothes. "didn't have to worry about money" means they didn't have to worry about not being able to make rent, or put food on the table, he doesn't mean that he had shit loads of money to buy mink coats and fast cars.

No there was no unemployment in the USSR. Of course there were people that must have fallen through the net, or lived outside the control of the government, but everyone that existed in documents and in files was given a job.


The blacksmith isn't complaining about not having a job. The guy is retired and complaining on behalf of everyone else. Maybe he doesn't get much pension, either.

Personally I'd rather be in a greedy capitalist society than a greedy communist one

Personally you haven't experienced both. East Germans have.

As far as a non greedy capitalist system goes... well if YOU had read all of Marx then you would know that by it's VERY NATURE capitalism has to be greedy to survive. I guess the closest thing would be the social democracies in Scandinavia, but that's just government and policies, rather than socio-economic structure.

Now, nobody can live in a communist society right now. It can't happen because people aren't ready for it. Socialism is the first step. Communism is a stateless society without money or classes, it's anarchy. Anarchists want it right away, Socialists want socialism first so that society can learn to live that way. Socialism (that "golden age") is where the state and it's means of production are run by everyone, rather than the oligarchy seen in the USSR. The Soviet Union never claimed that it was/is/reached commmunism, that's just a label used by the filthy west, although they did claim socialism, which you can take with as many grains of salt as when the USA says it is for Freedom and Democracy. When someone says they are a communist, it means that they want that to happen. The communist international was called that because it supposed to lead towards communism, not actually BE it. Karl Marx had never seen a "totalitarian communist government" so he couldn't give a criticism of it, but I'm sure he would understand that to be labeled such a thing would be a pretty big contradiction. Trotsky gave a critique and they put an ice pick in his head.