The General American Politics Thread

[Sami]

And neither can I! I'm In favor of gay marriage, abortion, etc. but there are bigger issues at hand. I hate Obamacare, bailouts, and tax hikes. And do you really think that Romney will somehow ban abortions?? Do you REALLY think that's possible?

He'll support a GOP-created ban. Yes, it is possible.

Oh, and insert typical "actually learn about what you're saying because Obama isn't socialist in the slightest" talk here. It's already been covered, so I won't waste my time with you.

[-Robin-]

Romney may not be able to ban abortions, but the Supreme Court sure can. With three progressive justices possibly vacating the occupancy in the next 4 years, the court's going to experience a shift no matter who is elected.

And I shudder to think of a court appointed by a president who has said clearly he would appoint people like ROBERT BORK, OF ALL PEOPLE, onto the Court.

Edited November 2, 2012 by Joshua

[Nepenthe]

I don't really care what you hate as our economic situation is not being properly addressed by the current Republican ticket. Their plan as I've seen thus far is to cut taxes significantly, and in order to somehow "balance the budget" in response to this decreased revenue for the government, slash public programs by either eliminating them outright or trying to privatize them. It's pure insanity what Romney and Ryan want to actually do for our current situation; the fact that the latter even looks up to Ayn Rand is a big fucking red flag.

Secondly, of course you could work to make abortions illegal. Abortions once were in the country. But whether or not this will be an inevitability is regardless of the fact that abortions have been increasingly difficult for women to get due to a systemic legal attacks and the enforcing of ridiculous rules and regulations on the facilities that provide these procedures, a movement mostly spear-headed by social and neo-conservatives, the people infiltrating the fucking GOP.

It will be a cold day in Hell before I bring myself to vote for a modern Republican, and it makes me upset to have to be so partisan because I feel like there's some decent guys in the party who've been overshadowed or run out of town by the loonies.

Edited November 2, 2012 by Nepenthe

[Patticus]

Out campaigning for Romney with my friend. Feels really good. We have liberals beating up gay conservatives, covering up Benghazi-Gate, lying about poll numbers (according to Rasmussen and Gallup, all of those numbers shown by Patticus are false, most of those states are going for Romney), refusing to let non-union relief efforts help, and ripping Romney signs out of yards, and here we are out giving a positive message to keep America away from the chains of European Socialism.

● Since when do liberals beat up gay conservatives? I'm pretty sure it's conservatives with the massively homophobic agenda. See: Rick Sanitorium, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin etc.

● What about Benghazi was actually covered up? And do try to source a news agency other than Fox. You can't know everything that happened immediately after the fact with so much ongoing confusion, so many conflicting eyewitness reports and rumors muddying the waters. The administration told us what it knew when it knew it, and because of all the confusion, as the picture has become clearer the story has inevitably changed. Investigations are still, IIRC, ongoing, meaning further changes to the story may occur in the future. Not having answers right away is not a sign of a cover-up and you have no basis for asserting that it is.

● The poll numbers I post aren't "lies", they're easily verifiable and come from a far wider range of polling organizations than just Rasmussen and Gallup (which, I might add, are accounted for in the 538 forecasts, and their numbers are, when posted, included in the running of the daily forecasts). It is foolish to only pay attention to one or two pollsters to the exclusion of everyone else - to only watch those polls which have a history of favoring one candidate over another. You're giving yourself a skewed perspective, and I think that you're doing this because the polling data released by other groups makes you uncomfortable; Romney's vaunted momentum seem to have evaporated, the president's firewall is still intact. According to the polling data from multiple groups, Florida is inching closer to Tossup status after spending a long while leaning Romney, Virginia seems to be leaning Obama now, and many of the other swing states appear to be leaning toward him to one degree or another too; Ohio, Wisconsin and Nevada are becoming more solidly blue with every passing day.

Whether the forecasts based on this data are born out on Tuesday night is of course yet to be seen, but I believe it will be.

● The Red Cross' policy of not accepting resource donations, only monetary ones, is long standing, and Romney's advisers should have briefed him on this before his campaign staff bought $5,000 of supplies at Walmart, which his supporters the next day "donated" to the relief effort. They should have been encouraged to give money, not actual goods.

● My Obama sign was vandalized, then stolen. The most likely culprit would be a Romney supporter.

● Your opinions on "European Socialism" appear to have come straight out of the Republican Propaganda Department (otherwise known as "Fox News"). Come back when you know what socialism really is.

And by the by, there's a fuckton of capitalism going on in Europe right now, and I reckon the members of the European Parliament could probably teach your Congressmen a thing or two about money-grubbing corruption.

[Tornado]

He'll support a GOP-created ban. Yes, it is possible.

[Patticus]

I honestly agree with him on this. I don't buy the idea that Romney would actually back abortion stuff in the slightest.

[Nepenthe]

Romney on abortion makes me nervous beyond his usual flip-flopping, because I don't want to count on him of all people to fight efforts by other Republican politicians to continue attacking women's reproductive health services considering how much he panders to this group anyway. I'm sure he won't make abortion illegal, but I've seen nothing to make me believe he'll actually better the situation either.

[Emmett L. Brown]

Here we go, more Liberal wordplay. All while you guys try to accuse us of every -ism and -phobia out there.

There's no encapsulating definition of Socialism, but in general it means that the government tries to help the poor from an Orthank-sized tower whilst taking money away from people who would've done a much better job helping them anyway.

Man, Europe must be scary in your warped imagination. I'm glad I live in a socialist paradise with economic stability and wellfare.

BOOGA-BOOGA-BOOGA!

[Nepenthe]

Man, that affordable and quality health care must be really nice over there in Yuro Land.

McCarthyism and the Cold War fucking ruined everything. ;~;

[Solkia]

So who's voting for Nader?

EDIT: sarcasm

Edited November 2, 2012 by Solkia-kun

[Nepenthe]

I will start entertaining the option of voting for third-party candidates when they can actually gain a significant foothold in the political sphere by tackling local level elections first and going from there. But for me to do so in a national election would essentially be handing a vote to Romney (not like he won't get my state anyway), and I think I've been pretty clear on how much I really don't like that man, so to answer your question: I'm not voting for Nader.

[Tornado]

So who's voting for Nader?

As is tradition, most of Florida accidentally.

[Patticus]

This is just great...

LIMA, Ohio -- Obama advisers David Axelrod and David Plouffe spoke with reporters after President Barack Obama's last of three campaign events Friday.

Near the end of the gaggle, Axelrod was asked about how the president feels in the last days of the campaign, and delivered possibly one of the more memorable lines of the campaign.

"I've known him for 20 years. We've worked closely for 10 years. I've never seen him more exhilarated than he is right now. He believes in what he's doing. He believes in what he's fighting for," Axelrod said.

"You know, you can see in the speech that he's delivering that he, you know, that he, this is coming from his loins," Axelrod said.

The reporters gathered around Axelrod tittered, and he was visibly thrown off balance for a moment. He tried to recover quickly by joking about the comment.

"And uh -- I just wanted to say loins. I wanted to see if I could get loins in the story," he said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/02/david-axelrod-obamas-loins_n_2067366.html

There are worse things that could come from his loins on live TV, I suppose.

[Tornado]

Little did the GOP know, Mitt Romney spent months of time and millions of dollars just so he can go on TV Super Tuesday and say "titty sprinkles."

[Patticus]

I think that, in a way, we'd all like to do that.

538's forecast from all of today's polling (so far?) has been updated twice tonight, and while it may be updated further later if there are one or two more pollsters who haven't yet released their results, right now, as of 11:08pm, it sits here:

Electoral Vote

Obama - 305.3 (+1.9)

Romney - 232.7 (-1.9)

Chance of Winning

Obama - 83.7% (+2.8%)

Romney - 16.3% (-2.8%)

Popular Vote

Obama - 50.6% (+0.1%)

Romney - 48.4% (Unchanged)

Not a great day for either campaign really, even after the update of the update of the update, but it was Friday and the jobs news probably didn't do much for either campaign. The president's fortunes seem to be continuing to recover though, which is a good sign for the Democrats.

Frankly, if you just watch Obama speaking, you can tell how hard his loins are surging these days, and I think TV viewers appreciate that, and I think that's being reflected in the polls.

Edited November 3, 2012 by Patticus
-- Thrice updated forecast figures. I guess there were a bunch of latecomers!

[Patticus]

Nate Silver has updated the forecast for a third time. See above for details. He has also written a new article about the polling and what it would take now for Mr. Romney to emerge as the winner, which I shall post below because it is well worth a read (yes, even for you, SpikySprinter, although methinks you'll still cry fowl). It's a long piece, so I'll put the bulk of it in a spoiler window so as not to take up too much space on the page.

Nov. 2: For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased

By Nate Silver

President Obama is now better than a 4-in-5 favorite to win the Electoral College, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. His chances of winning it increased to 83.7 percent on Friday, his highest figure since the Denver debate and improved from 80.8 percent on Thursday.

Friday’s polling should make it easy to discern why Mr. Obama has the Electoral College advantage. There were 22 polls of swing states published Friday. Of these, Mr. Obama led in 19 polls, and two showed a tie. Mitt Romney led in just one of the surveys, a Mason-Dixon poll of Florida.

Although the fact that Mr. Obama held the lead in so many polls is partly coincidental — there weren’t any polls of North Carolina on Friday, for instance, which is Mr. Romney’s strongest battleground state — they nevertheless represent powerful evidence against the idea that the race is a “tossup.” A tossup race isn’t likely to produce 19 leads for one candidate and one for the other — any more than a fair coin is likely to come up heads 19 times and tails just once in 20 tosses. (The probability of a fair coin doing so is about 1 chance in 50,000.)

Instead, Mr. Romney will have to hope that the coin isn’t fair, and instead has been weighted to Mr. Obama’s advantage. In other words, he’ll have to hope that the polls have been biased in Mr. Obama’s favor. (I recognize that ‘bias’ is a loaded term in political contexts. I’ll explain what I mean by it in a moment.)

There are essentially three reasons that a poll might provide an inaccurate forecast of an upcoming election.

The first is statistical sampling error: statistical error that comes from interviewing only a random sample of the population, rather than everyone. This is the type of error that is represented by the margin of error reported alongside a poll and it is reasonably easy to measure.

If you have just one poll of a state, the statistical sampling error will be fairly high. For instance, a poll of 800 voters has a margin of error in estimating one candidate’s vote share of about plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. In a two-candidate race, however, the margin of error in estimating the difference between the candidates (as in: “Obama leads Romney by five points”) is roughly twice that, plus or minus seven percentage points, since a vote for one candidate is necessarily a vote against the other one.

The margin of error is much reduced, however, when you aggregate different polls together, since that creates a much larger sample size. In Ohio, for example, there have been 17,615 interviews of likely voters in polls conducted there within the past 10 days. That yields a margin of error, in measuring the difference between the candidates, of about 1.5 percentage point — smaller than Mr. Obama’s current lead in the polling average there.

In other words, Mr. Obama’s current lead in Ohio almost certainly does not reflect random sampling error alone. The same is true in states like Iowa, Nevada, Wisconsin and others that would suffice for him to win 270 electoral votes. (Mr. Obama’s more tenuous leads in Colorado and Virginia, and Mr. Romney’s thin lead in Florida, potentially could be a product of sampling error.)

So why, then, do we have Mr. Obama as “only” an 83.7 percent favorite to win the Electoral College, and not close to 100 percent?

This is because of the other potential sources of error in polling. One is that a poll is a snapshot in time — even if you’re sampling the voters accurately, their opinions could change again before Election Day.

This is a huge concern if, for instance, you’re conducting a poll in June of an election year. Michael Dukakis led the polls for much of the spring in 1988; John Kerry did so for some of the summer in 2004; even John McCain, in 2008, had a few moments when he may have been ahead in the polling average.

But it’s now the weekend before the election. The vast majority of voters are locked into their choices. In some states, in fact, a fair number of them have already voted. (Perhaps about 20 percent of the vote nationwide has been cast, and the tally may be as high as two-thirds of the vote in some states like Nevada.)

Nor are there any more guaranteed opportunities for news or campaign events to intervene to alter the dynamics of the campaign, at least not at the national level. The debates have been held; the conventions occurred long ago; the vice-presidential nominees have been picked. The last major economic news of the campaign came on Friday, with the release of the October jobs numbers. A negative print on the payrolls report, or a sharp rise in the unemployment rate, could have altered the campaign, but instead the jobs report was a pretty good one. (I don’t expect the jobs report to produce much of a boost for Mr. Obama, but there’s little in the report that would aid Mr. Romney.) The recovery from Hurricane Sandy is still a developing story, but not one that seems to be playing to Mr. Romney’s benefit.

There is the remote possibility of a true “black swan” event, like a national-security crisis or a major scandal unfolding at the last minute, but the chance for news events to affect the campaign is now greatly diminished. And most of the polls that we’ve seen over the past several days are the last ones that polling firms will be releasing into the field.

That leaves only the final source of polling error, which is the potential that the polls might simply have been wrong all along because of statistical bias.

Polling is a difficult enterprise nowadays. Some estimate that only about 10 percent of voters respond even to the best surveys, and the polls that take shortcuts pay for it with lower-still response rates, perhaps no better than 2 to 5 percent. The pollsters are making a leap of faith that the 10 percent of voters they can get on the phone and get to agree to participate are representative of the entire population. The polling was largely quite accurate in 2004, 2008 and 2010, but there is no guarantee that this streak will continue. Most of the “house effects” that you see introduced in the polls — the tendency of certain polling firms to show results that are consistently more favorable for either the Democrat or the Republican — reflect the different assumptions that pollsters make about how to get a truly representative sample and how to separate out the people who will really vote from ones who say they will, but won’t.

But many of the pollsters are likely to make similar assumptions about how to measure the voter universe accurately. This introduces the possibility that most of the pollsters could err on one or another side — whether in Mr. Obama’s direction, or Mr. Romney’s. In a statistical sense, we would call this bias: that the polls are not taking an accurate sample of the voter population. If there is such a bias, furthermore, it is likely to be correlated across different states, especially if they are demographically similar. If either of the candidates beats his polls in Wisconsin, he is also likely to do so in Minnesota.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast accounts for this possibility. Its estimates of the uncertainty in the race are based on how accurate the polls have been under real-world conditions since 1968, and not the idealized assumption that random sampling error alone accounts for entire reason for doubt.

To be exceptionally clear: I do not mean to imply that the polls are biased in Mr. Obama’s favor. But there is the chance that they could be biased in either direction. If they are biased in Mr. Obama’s favor, then Mr. Romney could still win; the race is close enough. If they are biased in Mr. Romney’s favor, then Mr. Obama will win by a wider-than-expected margin, but since Mr. Obama is the favorite anyway, this will not change who sleeps in the White House on Jan. 20.

My argument, rather, is this: we’ve about reached the point where if Mr. Romney wins, it can only be because the polls have been biased against him. Almost all of the chance that Mr. Romney has in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, about 16 percent to win the Electoral College, reflects this possibility.

Yes, of course: most of the arguments that the polls are necessarily biased against Mr. Romney reflect little more than wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, these arguments are potentially more intellectually coherent than the ones that propose that the race is “too close to call.” It isn’t. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.

But the state polls may not be right. They could be biased. Based on the historical reliability of polls, we put the chance that they will be biased enough to elect Mr. Romney at 16 percent.

http://fivethirtyeig...sed/#more-37099

[a bad poster]

Here we go, more Liberal wordplay. All while you guys try to accuse us of every -ism and -phobia out there.

I'm a bit surprised that you would think it's okay for you to just come in the thread and post a bunch of buzzwords that you don't fully understand and that people would not call you out on it. It's telling that you cry "Communist" and then accuse everyone who disagrees "liberals", stated with every negative connotation in the book.

What is it about the ACA you don't like, anyway?

There's no encapsulating definition of Socialism, but in general it means that the government tries to help the poor from an Orthank-sized tower whilst taking money away from people who would've done a much better job helping them anyway.

There is an encapsulating definition of what Socialism is, and I'll give you a hint: that isn't it

Edited November 4, 2012 by a bad poster

[turbojet]

Here we go, more Liberal wordplay. All while you guys try to accuse us of every -ism and -phobia out there.

There's no encapsulating definition of Socialism, but in general it means that the government tries to help the poor from an Orthank-sized tower whilst taking money away from people who would've done a much better job helping them anyway.

Yes there is. Trust me, I read Communist Manifesto. It is pretty clear what Socialism is and how it is.

[Autosaver]

Obama is a communist.

You just have to study it out!

[Tornado]

Yes there is. Trust me, I read Communist Manifesto. It is pretty clear what Socialism is and how it is.

Obama is a communist.

You just have to study it out!

(You can tell it's the GOP Edition because it's red)

(Wait)

Edited November 4, 2012 by Tornado

[tenchibr]

*le me*

*believes in making the world better by peace and fellowship*

*looks up fellowship through thesaurus.com*:

fellowship 

Main Entry:

fellowship  [fel-oh-ship] acquaintance, affability, alliance, amity,camaraderie, club, communion, companionability,companionship, company, comradeship,conviviality, familiarity, friendliness, guild,intimacy, kindliness, league, order, society,sodality, togetherness

*thinks communion sounds better than capital*

*le Obama*

*is called a COMMUNIst*

COMMUNION

COMMUNI ON

COMMUNI

*le me*

*wants communion*

*votes for the Communist*

Edited November 4, 2012 by tenchibr

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

(You can tell it's the GOP Edition because it's red)

(Wait)

Tornado, you are fucked up.

[Candescence]

I loled as well.

Anyhow, Communism. On the opposite extreme end of the political spectrum from fascism, communism is indeed socialist, but socialism does not necessarily equal communism. Communism is socialism taken to the extreme, and ultimately is proving itself to have ultimately failed, as the fall of the Soviet Union and China's increasing capitalism is showing. The reasons why it's declining are somewhat numerous and complex and I don't exactly want to do an essay on that.

Certain socialistic ideas are certainly worth merit, and have proven themselves worldwide - Australia is one of the countries with "socialist" health care, among others, and it's leagues better than what the US has. Dismissing such ideas due to the old 'red scare' is a ridiculous and utterly stupid notion that americans really should stop doing.

Capitalism and socialism are things that are, in many cases, best utilized in moderation. A purely capitalistic society or a purely socialist one is ultimately doomed to ruin.

Edited November 4, 2012 by Masaru Daimon

[Patticus]

538's updated forecast, based on yesterday's polling:

Electoral Vote

Obama: 306.9 (+1.4)

Romney: 231.1 (-1.4)

Chance of Winning

Obama: 85.1% (+1.4%)

Romney: 14.9% (-1.4%)

Popular Vote

Obama: 50.6% (Unchanged)

Romney: 48.3% (-0.1%)

No new articles have been posted since the last one went up, but the press at large is still referring to this race as being a tossup, neck and neck, which clearly isn't reflected in the battleground state polls. While there is a distinct possibility that it might yet end up being incredibly close, a real tossup race just wouldn't produce 20 swing state polls, with 19 of them going for one candidate. There's not much of a chance that that many pollsters are that biased. So, no, I don't think that it's that close an election at all, and I think that the press is placing entirely too much weight on these national polls, to the point where the battleground polls are excluded.

[turbojet]

I loled as well.

Anyhow, Communism. On the opposite extreme end of the political spectrum from fascism, communism is indeed socialist, but socialism does not necessarily equal communism. Communism is socialism taken to the extreme, and ultimately is proving itself to have ultimately failed, as the fall of the Soviet Union and China's increasing capitalism is showing. The reasons why it's declining are somewhat numerous and complex and I don't exactly want to do an essay on that.

Certain socialistic ideas are certainly worth merit, and have proven themselves worldwide - Australia is one of the countries with "socialist" health care, among others, and it's leagues better than what the US has. Dismissing such ideas due to the old 'red scare' is a ridiculous and utterly stupid notion that americans really should stop doing.

Capitalism and socialism are things that are, in many cases, best utilized in moderation. A purely capitalistic society or a purely socialist one is ultimately doomed to ruin.

I'm going to do this just once so pay attention.

Socialism represents the ideology of those who were left behind during the rise of Liberalism. It is the ideology of the labor class. Socialism has a problem with not only liberal(Capitalism for more clarity) ideas, but the effects that liberalism brought. To put a definition on it, it is a system in which private enterprise is abolished and replaced by some form of common ownership of factories, farms, and other productive enterprises. All socialists, whether you are an Utopian, Marxist, Fabian, European Revisionist, Leninist, or Maoist, believe in the eradication of private property and capitalism is an exploitative and unstable system. Do you see Obama doing any of that Spiky? Hell, I recall during a debate that he does not believe government is the answer and ardently believes that capitalism is the most productive economic system that ever has been done. But lets get back to socialism and why it is what it is.

During the years that Liberalism(Capitalism if you are confused) and industrialization became predominant, many found a flaw in Liberalism. The likes of Thomas More and Charles Fourier saw mass inequality and instability within the system so in order to fix this, they thought that they could engineer social society to be better without capitalism and private property. They were the Utopian Socialist. The tenets of an Utopian Socialist were:

1. Do not like private property. Believed that it leads to nothing, but exploitation.
   
2. Emphasized community and solidarity, but to differentiate from Classical Conservatives, who also believed in community, but thought man were inherently unequal, Socialists believed in equality for all.
   
3. The Nature of man is that we have a social quality in us, and we have solidarity among us. This contrasts the tenets of Classical Conservatism which believes that man was rational, and to be rational is to be acquisitive. Unlike Classical conservatism, Utopian Socialist believe that there is no hierarchy that people confer their sovereignty to for protection from themselves.
   
4. Utopians wanted to administrate this view through education and disabuse the masses of the ideas of capitalism and liberalism that has been taught. Why they wanted to do this is because Liberalism was and still is the prevailing ideology at the time. People under a system of capitalism are going to be taught that if you work hard enough and find your niche, you too can become Bill Gates(I will to explain this later under Marxism).
   
5. As I already stated, they believed that they could socially engineer a society to contrast a society under liberalism just to provide an example of how much better Socialism is.
   
6. They thought Representative Democracy as the advocacy of the elites and were fervent believers of direct Democracy
   

After the Utopians tried and were laughed out of Europe, a Jewish man known as Marx came along and sought to scientifically prove that Liberalism would fall and Socialism would take it's place eventually. He viewed Utopians as normative, as it ought to be, instead of empirical, as they are. Marx only had 5 different ideas of Marxism.

The first idea was based on Georg Wilson Freidrich Hegel's Dialectical Flow of History(FUCK YOU! I'm not going explain what he is to you. Look him up and read that shit). Hegel and Marx believed that history has an identifiable direction, and a identifiable purpose. In other words, the direction of history was progressial. How is progress achieved is what your bitch ass is asking, right? Well, through conflict. All progress is made through conflicts in terms of contradictions that arise in all things, and ideas. Think about the human state of ideas, will you? There has always been a predominant set of ideas that would always produce it's opposite. You can take any idea and make it a thesis, thus creating it's opposite,it's antithesis. The two will produce a synthesis thus will represent progress. Let's take religion for example. Man used to believe in many Gods which was predominant in most cultures. This was the thesis. Then, they were paganistic views which serves as the antithesis. Through that, monotheism formed through the synthesis of ideas. Here is some visual aid for guidance.

The second idea was more of a differentiation from Hegel. Hegel thought that this progress is done by God in order unveil God's plan or some shit because he(God) acted through the minds of men. Marx, being an atheist thought this was bullshit(Religion is the opiate of the masses, anyone?) and was exponentially more materialistic. Marx believed that the material possessions that we have generate ideas not ideas produce better ideas. Marx believed that in any time period, one can divide the economic base of society and economic superstructure. Now you are probably wondering what exactly are they. No worries, asshole. Turbojet will instill your punk ass with knowledge because this is really good practice for my exam and I am really nice. There are components of the economic base of society: Means of production and the relations of production. The means of production is essentially the technological know-how of society at the time period. It is how society did things. The relations of production is the social relation in the production process. Marx believed that if he knew who controlled the means of production in any era and who dominated the relations of production, he could tell you who prevailed in the conflict and what the system was at the time. The superstructure of society is essentially anything that justifies the way the society is structure. It could be religion, ideology, government, art, literature, and etc. From this Marx concluded that the driving point of history has been the struggle of social classes. In any given historical era, there will be a conflict between the economic classes, mainly the ones who control the means of production and dominate the relations of production versus the ones who don't control the means of production and are at the lesser end of the relation of production. Again, here is some visual aid.

Through the combination of the two previous ideas, Marx developed his third: Dialectical Materialism He stated that he uncovered the laws of historical development. He claimed that there were 4 stages of historical development. To continue the theme of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, each dialectic era had them. First stage was primitive communism which was nomads/tribes/empire. Second stage was slavery which had empire/barbarism/landed aristocrats. The third was Feudalism which was comprised of landed aristocrats/bourgeoisie(merchants)/bourgeois democracy. The fourth, and what Marx says is the final, is bour. democracy/proletariat/communism. What you should notice here is that the antithesis always prevails and as each stage develops, there is more exploitation. "More exploitative? Isn't that a loaded statement, Turbojet?" Hold your horses, asshole. I'll explain that too. Marx pointed out why capitalism is unique compared to the other stages of economic development.

1. If one thinks about the economic mode of production, capitalism is constantly revolutionizing production. It always has to keep come up with something new. For example, look at your iphone or whatever. Next year, there will be a newer one and then a newer one in the year after next.
   
2. Capitalism is the only economic stage the envelopes the world.
   
3. There are only two classes: Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. Before you go, "there is a middle class and a lower class and an upper middle class," No the fuck there isn't, bitch(As you can see, I am becoming more and more irritated the longer I write this). There are people who own the means of production aka the filthy fucking rich versus people who don't own it aka the 99% aka probably everyone you know.
   
4. The ability of making it to the bourgeoisie is negligible and limited in possibility. Extremely limited. Damn near impossible. Unless you have a certain skill or asset that no one else possesses and is desirable, SOL.
   
5. It is the only stage of economic development that in which it falls, there is no more majority. When Capitalism collapses, and trust me, it will collapse, there is no more 1%. What else is there after the means of production is shared by everyone?
   

The fourth idea that Marx postulates is the need for Revolution. The current owners of the means of production isn't just going to bend over, hand the 99% lube, and get fucked in the ass willingly. The prevailing ideology justifies the current system of ordering things. Remember when that Occupy movement started? Did you hear the media say anything positive about them? Didn't think so. Owners of the means of production will use all means at their disposal to maintain current order. Whether it is government, media, art, literature, they will fucking do it. But why violent revolution? Marx could not find a single instance of large scale peace in any transition. War breeds change. There is no progress without conflict, says Marx.

Marx's fifth and final idea was essentially an outline why capitalism will fall. He sums it up as Capitalism having cancer as in it is eating away at itself. Yes, he agreed that capitalism is the most productive system of ordering economic affairs to date, but it is highly unstable. He, again, provided an outline why capitalism has the seeds of it's own demise.

1. The imbalance between production and consumption Under capitalism, the proletariat does not reap the surplus value of their production. In layman's terms, a capitalist will extract most of the money earned from the product made by the worker and the worker would only receive a small amount of it despite being the ones producing the item. A capitalist's goal is to pay the worker high enough to keep them around, but low enough to make sure they have the most to gain.
   
2. Grave-digger thesis This is the idea that capital will eventually fall into the hands of the few. The ideal capitalist is to expand and in order to expand, they must compete with and take out other rivals. As capitalist continue to gain, those former entrepreneurs are becoming part of the proletariat because they can only contribute their labor. In summary, the 1% is getting smaller while the proletariat is getting larger.
   
3. Falling rates of profit This the economic phenomenon where as capital accumulates and becomes more abundant, the rate of return declines thereby decreasing the incentive to invest. II don't feel like explaining this right now.
   

My main point is that Socialism as Marx defines it has never been achieved. What about Soviet Russia, Cuba, or China? Well they were in the feudalistic era and thus skipped capitalism to reach what they call Socialism and thus missed a shit ton of production that capitalism would bring. Socialism is supposed to be the goal for countries that are highly developed and have capitalism.