smilie

dream 4/22/24 it was dreary evening. i was in a conflict of sorts, a soldier i think, and a group of us were going up the stairs of a ruined square tower with stairs that wound around it. i was in the back of the line, and my gun went off, washing the steps in front of me in my fellow soldier’s blood. I didn’t mean to! I had to escape. i started running around what i now realized to be an island. in some places you could see craters from the conflict, and in other places the island just appeared to be a tourist destination. i inched my way carefully to the shore by hiding in one crater after another, and, on reaching the shore, i realized i had landed right in the middle of a beach event, where people were wading around in the water, hitting beach balls to one another and having fun. they had a very distinctive 1920s air to them. Some woman spotted me and yelled out to the authorities that i was there, and so, to disguise myself, i lept forward and grabbed a beach ball, bouncing it into the air off the surface of the water. i was a fish now. i bounced once, twice, numerous times, each time a little higher. i was bouncing to the high branches of the trees now! these were unheard-of records for fish. i think this liberated me somehow, and i found myself again human, on a pier in the water at the edge of the beach, just about where one might say the recreational portion of the water met the sea. it was dark, but i could see that past this platform there were two fences forming a corner that blocked me off from the rest of the sea. i bound over the obstacle and found myself blocked by yet another corner. i knew there were many more past this corner. somehow i ended up in a haunted-house-esque shack adjacent to one of these fence corners, and my parents were tailing behind me. i looked around, seeing a small opening in the back of the left wall. i tried to go through but it was too small and my arm was covered in spiderweb. i don’t know what happened after that. Athenians were obsessed with the perfect form. The perfect form was not only a hot topic in marblework, but also in philosophy. The prominent figures of Plato and Aristotle discussed this as the theory of forms (Duignan). Plato proposed that our world is contrived of imperfect copies of ideal Forms. Plato believed that there is a perfect version of this imperfect paper which I am unknowingly replicating. Perfect Forms are incapable of being physically manifested because a perfect Form would not change but physical things do change. Aristotle, a student of Plato, suggested less pessimistically, that forms must have been instanced perfectly in real life as well. He thought a form came into being when a thing is made, and they are altered or dissolved with a change or destruction of the thing. This also means that a perfect Form could, under Aristotle’s belief, be physically manifested, but it’s not guaranteed. Plato’s main purpose in pursuing philosophy was to come to an understanding of the most fundamental Form, the core Good. Aristotle didn’t have the assurance of a fundamental Good. Plato had an allegory about a cave (Cohen). In the cave there are prisoners lined up facing a wall lit from a fire behind the prisoners. On the wall they see the shadows of things passed by the fire, and so if they see a rectangle pass by they may infer that it is a book and call it that, but until they turn to see the true nature of the object, they don’t really have a grasp on the actual thing. Plato says to push one layer of being deeper and realize that how we perceive something may not be it’s true nature or define it in it’s entirety. This forms the foundation for one of my favorite modern philosophical concepts: simulacra. Simulacra was proposed by Jean Baudrillard in his book Simulacra and Simulation (Contributors, Simulacra and Simulation). Simulacra is the idea that something’s form is shaped by the perception of its nature. In Don Delillo’s White Noise (Contributors, White Noise (novel)), for example, the most photographed barn in the world only becomes the most photographed barn in the world because the perception of it as such builds up an audience who can fulfill its form and make it truly the most photographed barn in the world.   Communism is the natural progression of governance. When the people were fed up with the static class system of feudalism, they revolted. Capitalism resulted, freeing people from certain hierarchical stagnancy. Capitalism is a system of government in which a free market is controlled by private owners. Capitalism, however, is still restricting. In a free market there is little to restrict monopoly. So what is the logical revolt over capitalism? Socialism and eventually Communism. Socialism is a necessary step to achieving Communism. In socialism, the government controls and distributes public goods among the people, while still allowing personal property. Then Communism takes over when the government dissolves itself into the people and the people rule themselves. I’m sure we all agree that liberty and democracy is one of the most important features in a state, and the reality is that Communist states are much more liberating. Under a capitalist government, those in the lowest classes have no resources to rise in class, whereas the higher classes have ample means to income. Wealth gaps grow, and the impoverished are forced lower and lower into their rut. Under communism everyone is given equal opportunity. Good education is more accessible and those who devote themselves to something can still excel.  Probably the most shocking thing that I will put forward in this debate it this: there has not yet ever been a communist government. Every example you may give of a Communist country is not truly communist. They, at most, are socialist countries that enact Marx’s despotic inroads, the means to achieving Communism. These countries are not truly communist because they still have a government. There has not yet been a successful Communist state. This is because startup communist states have historically been endorsed by the USSR or eradicated by the United States. Any communist state that the USSR propelled has been imbued with their ideologies which weren’t changed past Stalin’s death. No one contests Stalin produced atrocities, but what we will disavow is Stalin’s interpretation of Communism. As it says in A Precocious Autobiography by Yevgeny Yevtushenko: “The magnificent words written into Stalin's Constitution- "Work in our country is a matter of honor, valor, and heroism" -were sometimes made to mean that work itself, as a symbol, was more important than those who performed it.” This is completely contrary to the Communist focus on fixing the work force so that the focus can be entirely off it, and onto the community. If you want to argue points regarding Communism as it stands, Socialism is our closest comparison.  Socialist states have been shown to have a better quality of life for their geographic economic state. The PQLI, or Physical Quality of Life Index, is a widely recognized measure of a population’s well-being. Socialist countries of any economic level exceed the PQLI score of any capitalist country in the same bracket. They have higher life expectancy and literacy rates, lower infant mortality, and a more balanced ratio of nurses and physicians to population. In many of these fields, upper-middle-income socialist countries even exceed high-income capitalist countries on average. Now to capitalism.  Capitalism is it’s own worst enemy. Under capitalism there are two groups: the proletariat, also known as the worker, and the bourgeois capitalist, also known as the owners of the means of production, those who profit off the workers. What does the proletariat want? As much of the money produced by their labor. What does the bourgeoisie want? ? As much of the money produced by their employees’ labor. Capitalism immediately clashes with itself. It is two parties tugging at the same rope, but when one party collapses, the other party has no tension to hold themselves up. Capitalism is unstable. Some may say that the benefit of Capitalism that Communism misses is financial incentive to work. This is incredibly pessimistic. There are numerous other incentives to work, such as passion, necessity, creative opportunity, companionship, and bettering one’s community. It’s degrading to suggest that a person must only be motivated by money. If one is only motivated by money, it is because that is what our Capitalist society encourages us to prioritize.