Lincoln's Socialist Tendencies

Threedee said:
As per always, leftists confuse libertarianism with anarchy. How predictable...

Prior to capitalism, property did not belong to the commons - it belonged to the crown. The crown, in turn, could gift anything he wanted to his subjects, such as titles of nobility, lands, wealth, etc. In America, land grants were issued by the crown to corporations in the form of monopolistic charters. The first two of these charters were the Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Company of Plymouth. The Plymouth Charter was squandered, and later sold to the Massachusetts Bay Company, which settled within the confines of the original charter, and famously landed its ships at the site of Plymouth Rock.

Capitalism began to take root here as people were allowed to settle and purchase their own lands. A growing class of gentry emerged, whose prestige and power were based upon wealth and merit rather than upon titles of nobility and the pleasure of the state. Regardless of how you feel about private ownership, I will remind you once again that to try and seize or abolish it is both immoral and un-American. Our history began with private property and ownership, and can only screech to a halt when tyrants such as you force your feudalism upon us as the Norman French forced theirs upon Anglo-Saxon England.

To celebrate Marx is always to celebrate murderous revolution. It is what he wrote about, talked about, advocated, and reveled in. He was an evil man with murder in his heart, who believed in the mass theft of all private property for the pleasure of the state. That he saw the benefits of democratic processes is of little reform - democracy was used to implement Nazism, and has led to all sorts of horror. In a Republic such as America, the Constitution and individual liberty trumps democracy, which is fortunate - it makes communism patently unconstitutional in any public form.

Lenin transitioned the USSR away from what he initially established, because the economy was failing. Is anyone really surprised?
Click to expand...

*sigh*

1. I did make a mistake there. What I should have said is that they were once not owned by anyone, and open for common use. They were simply seized after this. Does that not make you question what justified these seizures? Not any kind of morality, for sure.
2. You do understand that Marx became a democratic socialist by the end of his life? Michael Harrington had some good documentation of this.
That he was always a libertarian? He was always anti-state. Even an anarchist, sort of.
That the revolution he advocated didn't come out of nowhere? He saw the brutality of European unfettered capitalism, and sought to address it through revolution - though he clearly stated that the revolution would be organic and an inevitable product of capitalism.
Threedee, to celebrate Marx is to celebrate humanitarian philosophy.
3. Haha, you're funny. Lenin took power from Kerensky, a largely economicly passive democrat, and realized that the country didn't have the existing capability to put in place socialism. Thus, he began his decent to starving citizens and defending rule by the Bolshevik party. Russia was a peasant based country - the international community never wanted it to be the spring board for socialism.
 
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