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I don't trust Brazil at all. The government is a bunch of communists, friends of dictators (Maduro, Castro bros, african 'kings', iran ayatolah, etc). If you do

I don't trust Brazil at all. The government is a bunch of communists, friends of dictators (Maduro, Castro bros, african 'kings', iran ayatolah, etc). If you don't know, brazilians are ones of the most monitorated people in the globe. We are this time passing through a biometric registration, which soon will be compulsory. Illegal phone wiretapping is very common, and even the legal ones always end in the media, being used to character assassination. There are passed laws that will make long-range RFID obligatory in cars. How can the grazilian state be trusted?

huherto 13y ago
The political spectrum in the americas is a lot wider than that. Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador,...,Argentina, Brasil,...,Colombia, México, Chile,...,Canada,California,...,....,....,The Bible Belt. <-- Extreme left ----------------------- Extreme right --> So Brazil is not particularly crazy. It is in the left from the american point of view, but it is not as crazy as Cuba or Venezuela.
xj9 13y ago
Oh great, another dumbass who doesn't now what a communist is. I know the Cold War has turned y'all off from learning anything real about leftist ideologies, but c'mon, you know that Marx et al would be totally opposed to the totalitarian regimes that claim to espose their political theories.
- rogerthis 13y ago
  And another commy who has never read Karl Marx.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    I've read some Marx, though I wouldn't say I'm an expert scholar. But I'm having trouble understanding how Brazil even remotely resembles something Marx would like. It has even larger income and wealth inequality than the USA! And large portions of the economy are controlled by finance capital, multinational companies like Banco do Brasil, Santander, Telefônica, Cosan, etc., often in an incestuous relationship with political elites. Where is the equal distribution of resources, the control of the economy by workers, or any of the rest of the Marxist programme? I mean, Sweden looks more communist than Brazil to me, and Sweden is not actually communist (it's a capitalist welfare state).
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > I mean, Sweden looks more communist than Brazil to me, and Sweden is not actually communist (it's a capitalist welfare state). A welfare state like Sweden's is about what you get when you start with capitalism (under its original definition), and apply about half of the program in the Communist Manifesto to it. Western European and Scandinavian "welfare states" are the closest thing in the real world to applying the Marxist program to the kind of economies that it was designed to address what Marx saw as problems with. "Capitalist welfare state" is something that people are able to say with a straight face only as a result of the Cold War idea (mostly, ironically, originating from the side that ended up losing) that whatever stands in opposition to Leninism and its descendants is fairly described as "capitalism".
      - _delirium 13y ago
        True, it was initially quite a Marxist program, though at the time it was Marxist it was also considerably more ambitious: at one time the Scandinavian social-democratic parties included among their goals the eventual ownership and democratic management of the means of production by the workers. Their main difference with the Communist Party was that they believed it could be accomplished through incremental, non-revolutionary, Parliamentary means. Today's Scandinavian Social-Democratic parties have jettisoned that part of their ideological history and no longer mention it much, though, and nowadays the idea of workers owning the means of production is not so popular, and even the state doing so is less popular than it was, with many privatizations taking place over the past 30 years. Today's dominant ideology is probably something more like Poul Nyrup Rasmussen's "flexicurity" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity), which is the idea that in terms of economic organization and control, the society should be fully market-based, not worker-owned, with things allocated by supply and demand, hiring and firing being easy, etc. But then there should also be taxation to provide for a safety net so the lower end of society doesn't fall too far. There are a few exceptions, for example health-care is still mostly non-market-based. I think I agree that the Cold War cemented some of this, but afaik the idea of a capitalist welfare state originated considerably earlier, some of it in Marx's writing itself. He argued that one way capitalism would defend itself would be to institute reformist measures to ameliorate the worst conditions of the working class, in order to keep them from revolting (Otto von Bismarck pioneered the "right-wing welfare state" in the 1880s for precisely this reason). Thus the argument among many Communist parties of the late 19th and earthly 20th centuries that the Social Democratic parties were just helping capitalists to delay revolution, and not fundamentally leftist parties. And then later, capitalist theorists like F.A. Hayek were in favor of a kind of capitalist welfare state (basic income, free hospital care, etc.).

huherto 13y ago

The political spectrum in the americas is a lot wider than that. Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador,...,Argentina, Brasil,...,Colombia, México, Chile,...,Canada,California,...,....,....,The Bible Belt. <-- Extreme left ----------------------- Extreme right --> So Brazil is not particularly crazy. It is in the left from the american point of view, but it is not as crazy as Cuba or Venezuela.

xj9 13y ago

Oh great, another dumbass who doesn't now what a communist is. I know the Cold War has turned y'all off from learning anything real about leftist ideologies, but c'mon, you know that Marx et al would be totally opposed to the totalitarian regimes that claim to espose their political theories.

rogerthis 13y ago
And another commy who has never read Karl Marx.
- _delirium 13y ago
  I've read some Marx, though I wouldn't say I'm an expert scholar. But I'm having trouble understanding how Brazil even remotely resembles something Marx would like. It has even larger income and wealth inequality than the USA! And large portions of the economy are controlled by finance capital, multinational companies like Banco do Brasil, Santander, Telefônica, Cosan, etc., often in an incestuous relationship with political elites. Where is the equal distribution of resources, the control of the economy by workers, or any of the rest of the Marxist programme? I mean, Sweden looks more communist than Brazil to me, and Sweden is not actually communist (it's a capitalist welfare state).
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > I mean, Sweden looks more communist than Brazil to me, and Sweden is not actually communist (it's a capitalist welfare state). A welfare state like Sweden's is about what you get when you start with capitalism (under its original definition), and apply about half of the program in the Communist Manifesto to it. Western European and Scandinavian "welfare states" are the closest thing in the real world to applying the Marxist program to the kind of economies that it was designed to address what Marx saw as problems with. "Capitalist welfare state" is something that people are able to say with a straight face only as a result of the Cold War idea (mostly, ironically, originating from the side that ended up losing) that whatever stands in opposition to Leninism and its descendants is fairly described as "capitalism".
    - _delirium 13y ago
      True, it was initially quite a Marxist program, though at the time it was Marxist it was also considerably more ambitious: at one time the Scandinavian social-democratic parties included among their goals the eventual ownership and democratic management of the means of production by the workers. Their main difference with the Communist Party was that they believed it could be accomplished through incremental, non-revolutionary, Parliamentary means. Today's Scandinavian Social-Democratic parties have jettisoned that part of their ideological history and no longer mention it much, though, and nowadays the idea of workers owning the means of production is not so popular, and even the state doing so is less popular than it was, with many privatizations taking place over the past 30 years. Today's dominant ideology is probably something more like Poul Nyrup Rasmussen's "flexicurity" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity), which is the idea that in terms of economic organization and control, the society should be fully market-based, not worker-owned, with things allocated by supply and demand, hiring and firing being easy, etc. But then there should also be taxation to provide for a safety net so the lower end of society doesn't fall too far. There are a few exceptions, for example health-care is still mostly non-market-based. I think I agree that the Cold War cemented some of this, but afaik the idea of a capitalist welfare state originated considerably earlier, some of it in Marx's writing itself. He argued that one way capitalism would defend itself would be to institute reformist measures to ameliorate the worst conditions of the working class, in order to keep them from revolting (Otto von Bismarck pioneered the "right-wing welfare state" in the 1880s for precisely this reason). Thus the argument among many Communist parties of the late 19th and earthly 20th centuries that the Social Democratic parties were just helping capitalists to delay revolution, and not fundamentally leftist parties. And then later, capitalist theorists like F.A. Hayek were in favor of a kind of capitalist welfare state (basic income, free hospital care, etc.).