I'm kind of back but kind of...meh, screw it

What are; vanguardism and the mass party model? I wonder if you could define either of them (I don't blame you if you can't, since they are Marxist technicalities, just like the difference between ortho-Marxism and any other type of Marxism).

That's not the context in which ortho-Marxists argue for involvement in unions. The difference between Orthodox Marxism and any other type of Marxism (Trotskyism, Stalinism, left communism and so on) revolves around the tactics and strategy used to build the workers' movement and the socialist society, not the end goal of said movement and society. So the matters over which different types of Marxist (known as "tendencies" in the jargon) might argue are things like the importance of trade unions, the utility of parliamentary participation, whether democratic centralism is a viable method of party organisation, whether the working class even needs a party, the extent of programmatical unity, etc. etc.. Orthodox Marxists argue that socialists and our party should involve ourselves in unions because we stress the importance of creating mass political movements beyond the party, which is just the nucleus of the movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_demand (the transitional demand is kind of technical, but nonetheless an important point of difference between tendencies within Marxism.)

I'm not sure how centralism is in the eye of the beholder.

Except the people who sell their labour and whose exploited labour-power goes into making profit for the capitalist class. I.e. the vast majority of the population.

That's not communism, that's Utopian socialism, which has been dead for about two hundred years.

 

Seriously? I just refuted the human nature objection (and you didn't bother responding).

Nope. There is no "higher human authority" in communism because there is no state and no coercive power. In capitalism, however, there is.

 

That doesn't give young people any obligations.

 

The Soviet Union (1928 - 1933) had coerced collectivization of agriculture.

 

It obligates you to agree with everything I say, because I said so.

And stop being such a cotton-pickin', sloganeering commie. Please. You must know it's a dead end. Go to a few commie political meetings and look at the old irrelevant wrecks still hanging on to their yellowed copies of Kapital, dissipating their energy arguing the finer points of dialectical materialism and drinking discount wine. You don't want to end up like that.

I forbid it.

 

And note that the mods made me delete my own French signature because it's not in English (Si Dieu me prête vie, je ferai qu'il n'y aura point de laboureur en mon royaume qui n'ait les moyens d'avoir le dimanche une poule dans son pot!), yet you're allowed to keep yours, I see.

This is a clear case of age discrimination and I protest it.

 

Apropos

Op-Ed: Memo to idiots cheering Bernie and Hillary

 

Because when you're 14 everything is free, hence everything being free is your future.... 14-year-olds have have absolutely zero concept of responsibility - all they know is food in on the table and the world is terrible, but they're incapable of understand where the food comes from or how it gets to the table.

It's called being 14 and naive....

 

Ok, let an adult explain something to you. Indeed there is a higher power in communism because communism is nothing more than a fantasy - real communism takes central planning which requires an authoritarian government or cooperative society, problem is that you will never get a cooperative society, so you end up with an authoritarian government that dictates..... Kinda like when your mommy takes your phone away and grounds you for a week.... Well that is how a communist society is managed, because that is the only way to manage a communist society. Basically you're 14 forever...

You don't have a choice in your life, you will be doing chores for the rest of your life under communism...

Would you like that future?

Now go read Orwell's 1984 and when you're done with that book read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand..... Which society would you choose?

 

What cause oppression in the USSR was central planning - the notion that government could/can control and dictate - hence they had dictators. The same goes with Mao in China....

Humans don't like to be dictated..... The truly intelligent want nothing to do with communism/socialism - socialism is only beneficial to those that couldn't make it in a capitalism, but it is hell for those who are intelligent enough to succeed ...

I mean do you know that in the USSR people spent 10 hours a day working and another 2 standing in line for their rations?

You know what a ration is?

Yea, well in this capitalist society we don't have rations - we have jobs (and career paths we can choose) and because of that places called grocery stores - NO rations....

No, I don't have to line up for bread like in your ideal society....

 

The Soviet Union had an operative law of value and de facto capitalist property relations. It was far from being socialist/communist. And anyway, coercion would have to exist in the transition period. It is only sublated (?) in full communism.

 

Finally, someone admits it!

Ben je suis d'accord, c'est pas juste ! Ces anglophones et leur hégémonie...

En réalité, j'ai une signature dans une autre langue depuis décembre (d'abord en croate, ensuite en italien et maintenant bien sûr en français ).

 

Yeah, no.

1) I'm from Europe, where "socialism" mostly means DER OSTBLOCK (dun dun dun...) and is not encouraged at all.

2) I dislike Sanders and don't think he's a socialist, and the same goes for Hillary.

3) I disagree with Castro on most things.

Sooo...

 

The problem with Communism is the "transition period" never ends.

 

Food comes from poor countries whose resources were plundered and whose farmers are being ripped off and gets to the table through a tonne of underpaid labour and an allocatively inefficient system which happens to favour me. How's that?

Surely if communism were a fantasy, it would just be necessarily non-existent, not existent-but-with-a-"higher power".

Why does central planning necessitate an "authoritarian" (ugh, that word makes me want to summarily hang a kulak) government, what do you mean by "co-operative" and why is said co-operation impossible?

Who exactly is going to enforce this in a stateless society?

I have read 1984, as I mentioned, and Ingsoc was a caricature of Stalinism or more broadly, 20th century "totalitarianism", not socialism in general. Goldstein's book, the liberation scripture of the novel, was Trotskyistish (as were the POUM, for whom Orwell fought in 1936). If you think the novel was depicting socialism, you have utterly misinterpreted it and Orwell's own politics. Not to mention that a work of fiction is hardly going to be an accurate description of a political ideology. I doubt fascists would be too pleased if I were to tell them to read Bernstein's Choose a Bright Morning and claimed that it was an accurate description of fascism.

I've also read Atlas Shrugged, but maybe you haven't, given that the society it depicted was actually the antithesis of Rand's idea of an ideal society. I actually quite like Rand's writing, and her little individualist experiment was good novel material, but not realistic in the slightest.

That's not what central planning is. The planning authority is not necessarily a coercive agent. And in fact, the law of planning was only partly operative in the Soviet Union and every other faux-communist state, because they all had markets.

Way to insult the entire working class. Do you really think that the only "intelligent" (I hate that word too) people are those who rely on the purchase of other people's labour power to make a profit?

The USSR-which-had-capitalist-production-relations, yes...

Yay, we get to choose who oppresses us and how exactly we want to spend our lives doing something we don't even enjoy! We're so free!

Who would actually want to line up for bread? I mean, I know interesting conversations can happen in queues, but...srsly bruh. The funniest part is that one of the preconditions of communism is overabundance, which is the opposite of this.

- - - Updated - - -

It would end if the revolution spread and the countries involved weren't so backward and we organised the soviets more democratically and we didn't implement batsh*t policies like the NEP...

 

Il semble que tu as TOUT lu, et tu comprends tout. Réponses tout fait a tous les objections capitalistes envers le marxisme. Comment ça se fait quand on a 17/18 ans? Et, bien sûr, tout ça en anglais, en français, toujours impeccable, d'ailleurs. Pardonnes-moi si ta "jeunesse" pousse un peu loin ma crédulité.

Don't be mad at me. I just can't quite figure this, and I have pretty good radar.

 

Any government policy that takes wealth from some and gives it to others will make that government too powerful. Since power always corrupts, it is dangerous to put one's faith in a transitional period to some kind of collective. The best that can be done is to make sure government is at odds with itself and The People have the right to kick their butts out.

It's not perfect and can result in some confusion however, it has the possibility of trying out different ideas from very leftist to very rightest. The People don't need anyone else to tell them how much to give. They are free to make a profit and keep it. Taxation is a socialist development that the government levies for the supposed good of all but it is a very wasteful way to get things done. We actually pay for not having to worry about it. Roads, defense, etc. are all valid purposes for taxation but we pay a premium for it because we generally don't want to have to worry about it day to day freeing US to pursue economic success.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand. The return of overused and baseless political clichés is at hand. Repeating old anti-communist slogans and echoing the absurd rhetoric of the Red Scare slowly becomes entertaining, really. But will it ever end?

 

Yes. It basically already ended when the Berlin Wall was brought down by the former subjects of communism. We're just sweeping up ideological dust at this point.

(BTW, I got whacked by the mods for my French signature a while back, which they made me take down. May you have better luck with yours.)

 

Willingly misunderstood what I wrote, nice. While I meant the end of pointless arguments instead of productive and meaningful ones, you switched to the end of the Eastern Bloc. Kudos. As long as people don't realise that communism =/= Soviet Union and its puppets, all discussions regarding communism will be futile for both sides. Proponents will fail to present their political opinions because some people cling strongly to their (often limited) understanding of what communism is, and opponents on the other hand will fail to get to know other opinions, thus reinforcing their false beliefs. But to stay on topic; tearing down the Berlin Wall was just an opening scene of a prolonged struggle. With the fall of state socialism came a historical opportunity to search new means of opposition to capitalism. What you speak about was certainly the end for most state socialist systems, but it really just opened a new chapter in the long history of the struggle.

 

Just realised I didn't quote you properly in my response to this post and my response won't show up on your notifications. I'm quoting you again in case you didn't check back on this thread.

Pas vraiment tout ; j'ai beaucoup à apprendre. Je suis flattée que tu aies une si haute opinion de mes connaissances, mais t'as besoin d'ouvrir ton esprit un peu - il n'est pas du tout impossible pour moi d'être adolescente et d'avoir en même-temps une connaissance approfondie d'un sûjet qui m'intéresse.

 

Will someone please tell this person, with whom I am no longer on speaking terms, that I don't like kids who are smarter than I.

I knew what you meant, and I am all too familiar with the bogus argument that the Eastern Bloc was "not a true worker's/Scotsman's paradise." Unfortunately, the Eastern Bloc traces its lineage back to Marx. It's not my fault that every single one of the revolutions, without exception, screwed the pooch along with the worker's they purported to liberate (and don't forget China, Vietnam, North Korea, and -- what's that other one? -- Cuba, I think it's called). Moreover, I'm not all that sure that Marx would have disapproved of the "degeneration," just so long as he were assigned a comfy dacha by the seaside along with the other Marxist masters.

Notice too, on the hard core revolutionary boards, how eager the young commies are to spill themselves some bourgeois blood when they "get it right this time." You can't just keep denying that they are communists. That's exactly what they are. I hope you are not one of them.

 

Not sure whether to be flattered or not :s

Strangelove was not denying that the orchestrators of previous revolutions were communists; xe was denying that the societies which they created were communist. And I have explained the reasons why these societies never became communist countless times in this thread.

 

No true Scotsman is not about that. While the Scotsman fallacy indicates that a correct definition of the True Scotsman doesn't exist, there is a definition and criteria for a socialist/communist society. I'm sure you are familiar with that definition too. If a country doesn't meet the criteria, then it is not socialist. There is simply no reason in calling a country socialist if they only used socialist rhetoric and symbols, but in practice, their policies were more like state capitalist, authoritarian, etc. Of course spectacular (I mean spectacular in a Debordian sense) socialist states cling to Marx and Engels, where else would they find their legitimacy? The Inquisition used Jesus Christ to legitimize their violence and hatred, but that doesn't make all Christians inquisitors. That is true to Marxists as well. There was a strong anti-Leninist branch of Marxists and still there is. Nobody denies that Lenin was a communist, but many argue that the Soviet Union wasn't and there's a huge difference. Because later all the states you mentioned used the methods and policies of the Bolsheviks, there was simply no chance to drive these countries towards a more libertarian communist prespective. They saw the Bolshevik method as a good way to seize and stay in power, so they adopted it. (Also, some of these were just Soviet puupet states where a revolution never happened.) However, there was (and still there is) an other tendency of revolutionary activity on the left, which is usually ignored by those who think communism can be only Leninism or Marxism-Leninism. The struggles of the Free Territory in Ukraine, Catalonia during the early stages of the civil war, the Zapatistas, and more recently Rojava proves that. Or the 1956 revolution in Hungary where worker's councils were organized against bureucratic political authority of the communist party. Or the May of 1968 in France (which wasn't a revolution, but still shows that there is no need for a vanguard party to lead the people in their strife against capitalism.)

 

Yes, I am indeed. I've been hearing it and reading it for over 20 years, and now I've even got Preteen impatiently "explain[ing] the reasons why these societies never became communist countless times in this thread."

I know that young commies don't, in many cases, actively desire mass starvation and gulags, though there are those among you who lionize Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky and yearn to see my head on a stake: "We represent in ourselves organized terror—this must be said very clearly ...." But starvation, privation, scarcity, and oppression all happen. Inevitably. Repeatedly. Everywhere. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Castro were all Marxists of one flavor or another. Sure, I'll admit that they didn't achieve communism as you and Preteen define it. And you will I hope admit that they were all Marxists, and not of the theoretical or armchair variety.

It's always someone else's fault that these operational Marxists, the ones that go for genuine revolution, turn into monsters, amirite? Or it's imperialism's fault. Or that of the CIA. Or it's a lack of class consciousness, which a few years in the countryside planting rice by hand will correct, along with some lessons broadcast 24/7 over cheap loudspeakers. That's the reality of what communism becomes. There's never, ever anything wrong with the ideology itself, right?