Communism today

kowalskil · May 2, 2014, 4:32am

New Communist Manifesto

COMMUNIST MANIFESTO 2014,

posted at pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowals … festo.html

Feel free to share this link with others.

James_S_Saint · May 2, 2014, 5:21am

An interesting read. I don’t personally favor any of the common national stereo types and for specific and exacting reasons.

I particular appreciated the last bit;

Let me finish by quoting the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. Referring to the Soviet Union, he wrote: "Historians and others who, in later years, have sought to account for this unparalleled orgy of bloodshed and hypocrisy have posed questions that are not at all easy to answer. In the first place, what could be the reason for such destructive frenzy when, to all appearances, there was no real threat to Stalin or the regime, and every possible source of revolt within the party could easily have been wiped out without mass slaughter? In particular, how could this be explained when it seemed obvious that the wholesale destruction of senior cadres would fatally weaken the state, both militarily and economically?

Secondly, why was there a complete lack of resistance when all members of the population were threatened, even those who carried out the atrocities most devotedly? Many Soviet citizens had displayed military courage and had risked their lives in battle: why did no one raise a hand against the tyrant, why did all go willingly to the slaughter? Thirdly, granted that the victims of show trials were made to confess to non-existent crimes for propaganda reasons, why were such confessions extorted from hundreds of thousands or millions of lesser people of whom no one would ever hear? Why the tremendous effort to induce unknown victims to sign fantastic admissions which would be buried in police files and not used for any public purpose? The fourth question has to do with the acceptance of the Soviet ideology by many Western intellectuals."

These questions, and other related topics, are certainly worth debating, and not only in Russia.

So my question to you is, “Do you have answers for those questions?” and “What type do you support?”

kowalskil · May 2, 2014, 11:41am

James S Saint:

An interesting read. I don’t personally favor any of the common national stereo types and for specific and exacting reasons.

I particular appreciated the last bit;

Let me finish by quoting the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. Referring to the Soviet Union, he wrote: "Historians and others who, in later years, have sought to account for this unparalleled orgy of bloodshed and hypocrisy have posed questions that are not at all easy to answer. In the first place, what could be the reason for such destructive frenzy when, to all appearances, there was no real threat to Stalin or the regime, and every possible source of revolt within the party could easily have been wiped out without mass slaughter? In particular, how could this be explained when it seemed obvious that the wholesale destruction of senior cadres would fatally weaken the state, both militarily and economically?

Secondly, why was there a complete lack of resistance when all members of the population were threatened, even those who carried out the atrocities most devotedly? Many Soviet citizens had displayed military courage and had risked their lives in battle: why did no one raise a hand against the tyrant, why did all go willingly to the slaughter? Thirdly, granted that the victims of show trials were made to confess to non-existent crimes for propaganda reasons, why were such confessions extorted from hundreds of thousands or millions of lesser people of whom no one would ever hear? Why the tremendous effort to induce unknown victims to sign fantastic admissions which would be buried in police files and not used for any public purpose? The fourth question has to do with the acceptance of the Soviet ideology by many Western intellectuals."

These questions, and other related topics, are certainly worth debating, and not only in Russia.

So my question to you is, “Do you have answers for those questions?” and “What type do you support?”

Only a general answer;–too much executive power in the hands of an evil genius is the main reason.
Ludwik

Uccisore · May 2, 2014, 3:07pm

It seems odd to me to criticize Stalinism on the grounds that it persecuted people needlessly. Socialism/Communism is not ultimately pragmatic, though it often moves in a pragmatic way. Stalin had enemies: not in the sense of being a real threat, but in the sense of, due to his ideology, being evil people who had no place in the society he was building. I think it’s an application of an Americanized perspective to say that, because Stalin did these bombastically horrible things, there must be some pragmatic, real politik reason for it. “Hell on Earth” is a good description, not only because of the suffering, but because the actual function of much of what Stalin and Mao did was nothing more than to torment people they felt deserved it.

James_S_Saint · May 2, 2014, 3:16pm

How a man handles his enemies determines his righteousness or evilness.

zinnat · May 2, 2014, 5:36pm

That is true.

Almost the same thing is said in Hinduism in a slightly different way-

The character of anyone should be judged on the basis of how one behaves with those. who are inferior to him, not superior.

with love,
sanjay

The_Golden_Turd · May 3, 2014, 12:51am

Ummm… I never could quite disgest how the Mahabharata War ended with Arjuna giving a deeply anticlimactic haircut… so obviously in terms of perspective, in the heat of the moment, such a moralistic rule when executed can be taken as meaningless by a faction. Justice by honor and through proxy breeds hurt feelings, insults, and fuels the need for revenge.

e reason why Stalin killed off so much of his senior staff in the red army was threefold:

He was a Generalissimo, and such men can be replaced easily by senior military officials backed by cliques.
Trotsky was the early military theorist who advocated a early form of the Soviet Deep Penetration Strategy, gained from leading guerrilla raids on the white army, deep in their rear. Stalin butchered the people holding these policies… kicked out and demoted the rest. It took them half of WW2 to regain power.
Stalin was a control freak… was consistent.

He killed alot of Ukrainians too… needed food and currency, seemed genocide was a fair trade. He sold mechanized weapons in spain for gold too. Massive hard currency needs in trying to buy bourgeois industrial machinery…

Soviets didnt need to, however, kill anyone. They artificially rushed themselves. Had the just reverted back to a congress of soviet style communes and trade unions, and kept their defensive line from WW1 intact… they could of fortified it and just focused smartly on agriculture and light industrialization, and still been around to this day.

You only have to look at multi-ethnic countries like (british) Guyana to know languid, unobtrusive collectivism is possible. The army has a good repore with the people, though largely useless… but manages to have a fantastic relation with the major superpowers. That all the while starring down chronic threats if invasion from Venezuela.

So yeah, it could be done… but its rather disappointing to look at. I figure capitalism in the west will eventually just hunker down in such a pattern on its own eventually.

LaughingMan · May 8, 2014, 3:27am

Communists today. Just more oligarch fucktards.

The_Golden_Turd · May 9, 2014, 3:51am

Actually… Ive been invited to Communist meetings, being the somewhat official local philosopher when running a philosophy group… it was mostly just women… had a Joy Luck Club feel to it. The literature of armed revolution on the bookshelves just didn’t match up with their expensive hairstyles and pedicures… the communist party in many places is just a militant green party these days lead by back to earth hippies. Yet they still use all the old codewords, and try hard to make it a logical continuation of Ye Olde Fuck You in the Ass Marxism.

But I met some people still of that Ye Olde system in San Francisco… and they don’t care about ecology, they just want to kill me, cause I was homeless… which alot of people today dont realize… your Hardcore Communist only cares about the proletariat, not the homeless, not your peasants. Read Jack London’s ‘Iron Heel’… it was a genocidal Marxist Insurrection mainly aimed at using the homeless as cannon fodder. Some still hold to this, and one took control of the Occupy Wallstreet group in SF for a while, and half that silly group was… yeah, you guessed it, homeless.

Marxists are jyst damn wacky, almost as fucked up as Nietzscheans. Very similar, those two groups.

Uccisore · May 9, 2014, 5:05pm

One of my old professors is a hardcore Marxist, and he teaches a class on Marxism where the entire purpose is to brainwash people. It’s equal parts funny and scary. I remember one occasion where a friend of mine in that class was talking about Mao and how great he was- they were reading the Little Red Book and such. I pressed him a little bit, and he didn’t know about the Great Leap Forward, the Thousand Flowers Campaign, Struggle Sessions, or basically anything that actually happened when Mao got in power- the class was pure theory abstracted from the fact that the theory was put into practice, and the results it had.
I was in a Philosophy of Religion 101 class taught by this same professor. We didn’t actually learn about religion, it was just week after week of nuclear disarmament, anti-death penalty, anti-capitalism stuff like all his classes except that the advocates we read for these positions were all Friar so-and-so or some former nun or whatever. The set up of the class was that we’d do the reading, and a small pre-assigned group would lead the discussion the next day with questions and such- the professor doing very little but providing brief commentary and a reminder of what the next week’s class was going to be at the end.
So, this one week we were reading about how some guy doesn’t like Catholic just war theory. He took each of the 10 or so principles of it and criticized them, and the class did a presentation. I made a couple of points in the discussion:
1.) The critic of just war theory was considering each criteria independently as a stand-alone judgment of whether or not a war is just, and ignoring that every criteria has to be present for a war to be just.
2.) The critic’s theoretical objection was that it took moral absolutes like ‘thou shalt not kill’ and turned them into subjective matters of interpretation. I pointed out that ‘thou shalt not kill’ was never a complete absolute, as evidenced by the fact that the first thing Moses did after pronouncing the commandment was to kill a whole bunch of people for worshipping the golden calf.

So the professor, who like I said, basically never contributed anything, took 10 minutes at the end of that class to chastise ‘certain people’ for criticizing things they clearly hadn’t read or comprehended. Now, he didn’t name me, but it was a small class and I was the only one who said much, so he clearly meant me. So, for the next two lectures, I just sat there quietly goofing off on my laptop all class. As I said, it was a small,timid class, so if I didn’t participate in the discussion, there was no discussion. Three weeks later, he started class up with a comment saying that he didn’t mean to imply, previously, that certain people shouldn’t participate at all. So I immediately resumed facilitating conversation in his class again. He was a tool.

kowalskil · May 9, 2014, 5:25pm

Uccisore:

One of my old professors is a hardcore Marxist, and he teaches a class on Marxism where the entire purpose is to brainwash people. It’s equal parts funny and scary. I remember one occasion where a friend of mine in that class was talking about Mao and how great he was- they were reading the Little Red Book and such. I pressed him a little bit, and he didn’t know about the Great Leap Forward, the Thousand Flowers Campaign, Struggle Sessions, or basically anything that actually happened when Mao got in power- the class was pure theory abstracted from the fact that the theory was put into practice, and the results it had.
I was in a Philosophy of Religion 101 class taught by this same professor. We didn’t actually learn about religion, it was just week after week of nuclear disarmament, anti-death penalty, anti-capitalism stuff like all his classes except that the advocates we read for these positions were all Friar so-and-so or some former nun or whatever. The set up of the class was that we’d do the reading, and a small pre-assigned group would lead the discussion the next day with questions and such- the professor doing very little but providing brief commentary and a reminder of what the next week’s class was going to be at the end.
So, this one week we were reading about how some guy doesn’t like Catholic just war theory. He took each of the 10 or so principles of it and criticized them, and the class did a presentation. I made a couple of points in the discussion:
1.) The critic of just war theory was considering each criteria independently as a stand-alone judgment of whether or not a war is just, and ignoring that every criteria has to be present for a war to be just.
2.) The critic’s theoretical objection was that it took moral absolutes like ‘thou shalt not kill’ and turned them into subjective matters of interpretation. I pointed out that ‘thou shalt not kill’ was never a complete absolute, as evidenced by the fact that the first thing Moses did after pronouncing the commandment was to kill a whole bunch of people for worshipping the golden calf.

So the professor, who like I said, basically never contributed anything, took 10 minutes at the end of that class to chastise ‘certain people’ for criticizing things they clearly hadn’t read or comprehended. Now, he didn’t name me, but it was a small class and I was the only one who said much, so he clearly meant me. So, for the next two lectures, I just sat there quietly goofing off on my laptop all class. As I said, it was a small,timid class, so if I didn’t participate in the discussion, there was no discussion. Three weeks later, he started class up with a comment saying that he didn’t mean to imply, previously, that certain people shouldn’t participate at all. So I immediately resumed facilitating conversation in his class again. He was a tool.

Thank you for sharing,

Ludwik

The_Golden_Turd · May 9, 2014, 7:39pm

Yeah… you just described a few professors I know. There are a few okay ones, but the bad apples are enough to make not getting a expensive degree in philosophy worthwhile and justifiable.

And people just dont grasp how deep and wide some of the philosophical movements, many of which outright contradict themselves, exist in the Catholic Church… we even have a few variations of Atheists in it, and some very Marxist like in Liberation Theology. Its why you never see me calling out turtle on the forum, a few major catholic philosophers arrived at similar conclusions…

Hence part of the reason why I dont call myself a Catholic Philosopher, Im a philosopher who happens to be Catholic. People think because you fall into a category your a theologian with a opinion sanctioned by the church.

Uccisore · May 9, 2014, 8:11pm

Christian philosophy outside the Catholic Church isn’t much better. Christian Philosopher often means ‘politically radicalized heretic’, and philosopher who happens to be a Christian tends to be a lot more grounded. I think the tendency is that a Christian philosopher is somebody who is out to do something with Christianity to fit some personal journey or agenda. A philosopher who happens to be a Christian seems to be working on other stuff, and allowing his Christianity to inform his philosophy where appropriate. The philosophy and the Christianity both seem to survive that better.
The first two years of my philosophy degree were rough, it was almost all political philosophy, and it felt like I was asked to ‘choose between’ all these positions that were about the same thing- Am I a Hegelian, a follower of Rousseau, or a Marxist? Ooh, such wide variety! It was my last semester that I started hearing the names Frederick Hayek, Edmund Burke (how do you talk about Rousseau without mentioning Burke, in good conscience?), Russel Kirk, etc. Kirk is an especial influence on me, and I couldn’t find a faculty member who had heard of him. I had to tell my advisor about G.K. Chesterton. Not a philosopher, fine, but the man was a former Catholic!
Interestingly, my political science department was much better than the philosophy department, in terms of acknowledging the existence of things other than Marxism.

The_Golden_Turd · May 9, 2014, 10:08pm

Haven’t read Russell Kirk…

It’s tough, for me now… the stupid book Im doing with the professor, who works at a Catholic college, touches theological issues… its Taboo for me to do that, as I was in the military… plus I would have to seek out the permission of a bishop in that case to look over the theological aspects of the book… since it has to do with alot of law, art, theology, and theory of mind… I selected works on the evolution of the early college system, and her Order…

So she realizes I wont do this without approval, and my bright idea was to go to her theology department and get the friar to sign off… she goes and talks to the head, a Female Protestant Minister who somehow got in as head of theology at a Catholic University… and she just happened to be working on a similar research project! Oh joy… clearly the Cardinal is paying attention… so that shit got axed by me. I could tolerate any single category… a female can hold a theology degree and teach… in both the catholic and orthodox churches (considered a Rabbi), but cant obviously be a priest. Its legitimate to have hindu and muslim professors teach in a theology department, as they would, duh … know more about said religions, but short of a rare exception, no… never let them head… and I expect the same from their universities.

And so, now we gotta shop around, which sounds wrong as hell, for a bishop who pays attention to overlook the text before it is published. Makes it easier to abandon her as she is doing really, really bad in comparison to my research too…

This being said, there are some good christian theologians who are protestant that deal with theory of mind issues, at least as good as say, Searle, I come across them on occasion. Just… unfortunately lay protestants are not into reading up on their own religion like catholic and jews are, there is a reason why no protestants sit on the supreme court, and countries like Sweden and The Netherlands, Christianity has untellectually died off… lazy people = lazy thinkers. You gotta have a hunger for life… some protestants do, but no one reads them enough to have a impact.

You dont see this in protestant movements of other religions… The Bahai tend to be well read in comparison to the Shiites, the Nicheran and Dogen Zen movements are quite intellectual and vibrant.

Arminius · June 8, 2014, 1:39am

Communism have killed the most people of all time. Please don’t forget that. Egalitarianism is a homicidal system like any other totalitarianisms, and they all fail at last at the fact that they don’t work.

Then come to Europe where it is different, especially in Germany.

Banshii · June 8, 2014, 9:36am

Thanks for that link Arminius.

Peter_Kropotkin · June 8, 2014, 4:14pm

People make the mistake of thinking what Stalin, Lenin and Mao for example was
communism, whereas it had little or no reality to what Marx wrote. Communism was
a means for these people to gain power which was the goal, not communism. They justified
their actions via communism but the truth was they were greedy power hungry murderers.
this is why I say, Marxism has never been put into action anywhere in the world because it hadn’t.
What we saw in the 20th century was Stalinism, Leninism, Maoism and those systems had
no interest in anything but power. So today when people say, “Communism has failed” they are
referring to something other then what Marx envision and wrote about. Because Marx believed
and wrote about a system that was a bottom up system which means the power came from the bottom
up. In Stalinism, Leninism and Mao the system was top down, the power came from the top then went down.

So where we stand today is nowhere because of this common mistake of thinking that communism is dead
without specifying what you mean for example if you mean Stalinism is dead, then you are correct if you
mean Marxism then you are wrong. communism is dead but Marxism will come back and I believe if done
correctly, will succeed.

Kropotkin

Orbie · June 8, 2014, 4:46pm

James S Saint:

An interesting read. I don’t personally favor any of the common national stereo types and for specific and exacting reasons.

I particular appreciated the last bit;

Let me finish by quoting the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. Referring to the Soviet Union, he wrote: "Historians and others who, in later years, have sought to account for this unparalleled orgy of bloodshed and hypocrisy have posed questions that are not at all easy to answer. In the first place, what could be the reason for such destructive frenzy when, to all appearances, there was no real threat to Stalin or the regime, and every possible source of revolt within the party could easily have been wiped out without mass slaughter? In particular, how could this be explained when it seemed obvious that the wholesale destruction of senior cadres would fatally weaken the state, both militarily and economically?

Secondly, why was there a complete lack of resistance when all members of the population were threatened, even those who carried out the atrocities most devotedly? Many Soviet citizens had displayed military courage and had risked their lives in battle: why did no one raise a hand against the tyrant, why did all go willingly to the slaughter? Thirdly, granted that the victims of show trials were made to confess to non-existent crimes for propaganda reasons, why were such confessions extorted from hundreds of thousands or millions of lesser people of whom no one would ever hear? Why the tremendous effort to induce unknown victims to sign fantastic admissions which would be buried in police files and not used for any public purpose? The fourth question has to do with the acceptance of the Soviet ideology by many Western intellectuals."

These questions, and other related topics, are certainly worth debating, and not only in Russia.

So my question to you is, “Do you have answers for those questions?” and “What type do you support?”

 Answer: Stalin was paranoid.

Arminius · June 9, 2014, 3:48pm

Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were the greatest murderers of all time.

Marx was a Hegelian, a left Hegelian.

That’s right. But do you really believe in Marxism, that there will once be a “bottom up system”? Do you believe in that? There has never been existing any single example of a “bottom up system” in societies with more than about 1000 people.