<<So with communism the success it is in China, when can we expect the hunger of the masses worldwide to disappear?>>
With an air freshener freshening my home in Toronto, when can we expect the rest of the world to smell nice too? The answer to your question is, when they too abolish capitalism and adopt communism.
<<And was hunger unknown worldwide during the Soviet heyday.>>
To the great panic of the capitalist powers, it appeared that the Soviet system was going to appeal to all of the hungry and the oppressed of the world, so they financed Hitler, sicced him on the U.S.S.R. and hoped for the best. Unfortunately their attack dog seemed to have a "mind" of its own and things did not work out as planned, but it did manage to wreak a lot of devastation on the U.S.S.R. anyway.
<<See you talk systemic and then you give examples of more topical applications, ad hoc if you will.>>
Not true. I talk systemic within the national framework of those countries that have adopted communism, not worldwide. Communism in China won't directly affect hunger in the Congo any more than an air freshener in my home will make yours smell any better.
<<Earlier i was the bad guy and you were the good guy, yet in the example of the person drowning, apparently i was the good guy and you were just a talker from the bleachers.>>
And yet thousands of people still drowned in that year.
<<How is communism prepared to handle famine? We have examples from the Soviets and the Chinese and they don't come out looking so rosy.
My guess is the problem was with the management of the crisis.>>
You don't have to guess -- in both cases, any famine, if it existed, was caused by the sabotage of anti-communist small landholders ("kulaks") holding back their produce from the food commissars and murdering communist agents sent to collect the food. This in fact was what made the liquidation of the small landholder peasant class an essential in both China and the U.S.S.R. Their greed was starving the nation.
<<In another thread you applaud Chavez for encouraging local communes, much like the council Marxists we spoke of earlier, yet you deride the local efforts of a municipal food drive as not being systemic enough.>>
"Deride" is an unfair term. Hunger in the Third World is not going to be solved by food drives in Georgia. The same capitalist system that provides the bourgeoisie with the excess wealth that, as the spirit moves them, they can dispense on occasion in local "food drives" is exactly the system that keeps the Third World in poverty and deprivation for generation after generation.
<<See, i think you really aren't as concerned about the hungry as you are of manipulating their suffering to your ideological advantage.>>
LOL. The ideology was conceived as a response to the suffering of the hungry. It did not exist independently of the problems that it is designed to relieve. Without the suffering of the hungry and the oppressed, there would be no need for Communism in the first place.
<<Earlier you scoffed at my reference to an Army of one, totally misunderstanding my point.
<<The difference between my philosophy and yours is that you think a system has to be in place where everyone marches in lockstep and my philosophy is it doesn't take a politburo, or a village, it just takes one person to act and another human being or more's suffering might be eased.>>
The obvious answer to that is that individuals have been free to act charitably at all times and under all regimes, since the dawn of the human race and yet we have crushing problems of human misery growing as we speak and existing forever under the capitalist system. Surely nothing else can better demonstrate the total failure of "Armies of One" than that.
OTOH, the introduction of Communism in both Russia and China (and Cuba) had IMMEDIATE beneficial effects on literacy, health, general education, housing etc., effects which are still continuing in China and (despite the blockade) Cuba, whereas in Russia, the abolition of Communism had an immediate and continuing deleterious effect on health, longevity, education, etc. The Russian people are worse off under capitalism and the Chinese and Cuban people better off under communism. What more proof do you need?
