What's wrong with the Left?

Last week, we looked at the downfalls of capitalism and also started to look at the opposite of capitalism: Communism. To start with, we looked at the less extreme version of that, which was democratic socialism. The case study that we looked at to show these values were of Robert Owen and New Lanark in Scotland, which was generally seen as a successful social experiment.

Some of the main ideas incorporate that people are looking out for one another and, in general, are helping the group achieve success and prosperity, as opposed to being individually responsible for that. We will finish up with our discussion of the pros of communism but also look to criticize the idea as well. As with any ideology, there are both good and bad parts of the idea, and like we discussed last week, a large part of that comes with how people interpret those different ideas and how much they actually stick to it.

So what will we cover this week?

Monday: 

• Finish the notes on the pros of communism

Click to see the history behind the development of the board game monopoly

• Practice interpreting sources

Tuesday: 

• Start with the cons of communism
• Case Study: the first communist nation - the USSR
• To go through the cons, we will be doing a quick history of how and why communism was implemented in Russia (which then became the USSR) and how the system actually was run
• History of Communism - Link to history of how communism developed

Wednesday:

• The Cons of Communism - Life in the USSR
• Jigsaw with the case studies
• Discussion: Why were there so many inefficiencies?
• Generalizations - what happens when capitalism is not so great? What happens when communism is not so great?

Thursday: 

• Rants by Tiffany and Danny
• Practice Writing Paragraphs
• 30-1 - adding evidence to last week's paragraphs
• 30-2 - writing your opinion in Assignment 3

Friday: 

• Maybe another pop quiz??
• How the theories of capitalism and communism/socialism were implemented in history
• Stage 1: Fixing the problems of the Industrial Revolution
• Classical Conservatism

• Societal Changes - the government gets involved