Was the French Revolution good or bad?

If you could direct me to any statements by leftists prior to 1989 predicting the fall of Communism I would be interested in reading their arguments.

 

I don't know who wrote the report on the French Revolution but he was so obviously a lefty dingbat that you should really consider ignoring it. It does however follow that communist dingbats would wish to ape the Jacobins and have as a general rule done so whenever they've had the opportunity. So what were the Jacobins about during their fortunately brief hey day? Why killing everyone that had anything and dividing the spoils among themselves and their more rabid followers. Mao did it in China, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Lenin and then Stalin in the soon to be USSR.and all of their various satraps. Any one who equates this with good has no business whatever near the levers of power.

 

Yeah, and the British and Americans (Capitalists) did this across the entire world killing far more people than the Communists. Try again.

 

A lot of times when people think something was destroyed or eliminated it actually turns out it was just merged. For example, anthropologists for a long time thought that Neanderthals were killed off by homo-sapiens over time because they were "inferior" or less evolved, which is partly true im sure many of them were killed, but what they found out was instead of being "eliminated" out of existence, they were breed out of existence, they merged with homo-sapiens. The same is true for Communism, it was not "eliminated out of existence" for the most part, it breed with Capitalism and they had little Capitalist Welfare State babies. Communism has not fallen, the same way Neanderthals have not exactly fallen, they have simply merged with the dominant system. Another example is the Communist Party of America, if you read about it it says it basically was destroyed by the FBI during the Red Scare, which is partly true, but the fact is they were not exactly "destroyed", they are still Communists, they simply left the Communist Party and merged with the Democrat Party. Point being, most things that are "destroyed" arent actually destroyed, most of the time they just move somewhere else and change their name or merge with something more dominant and protected. Its a survival strategy, instead of being eliminated entirely you settle for a merger. Like a failing business for example, instead of losing EVERYTHING you may be able to merge with someone stronger who can save you, you lose some independence but you still live and so do your ideals.

Its like a pendulum though, it goes back and fourth. During the Great Depression it was Capitalism that was on its knee's about to be eliminated, and in order to save Capitalism FDR merged it with Communism, and it worked, instead of losing Capitalism all together he made a last ditch effort to save it by merging it with the next dominant position, Communism.

 

Read anything written by Noam Chomsky on the subject, for one.

 

So you don't have any statements by leftists prior to 1989 predicting the fall of Communism either.

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Well I'm anxious to read his referenced statement.

 

Mate you're clueless.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1986----.htm

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There are many, also many videos of debates where he reiterates this point. You should correct your woeful ignorance.

 

Never said there was, that wasnt my point. I was just speaking about the notion of Communism falling not being entirely true.

 

That's a good point, since communism has never existed. To say communism existed in Russia, as Chomsky points out in the article I referenced also, actually misunderstand the entire meaning of the word and its ideological underpinnings.

 

Sorry we didn't even get close.to the totals the communists did and because we held the sick bastards at bay a hell of a lot of people lived that would otherwise have died.

 

In India alone under British Capitalist rule more died from starvation due to Capitalist free market policies than all the people killed by Communists combined.

 

You know, I get a kick out of being corrected on my "woeful ignorance" by someone who is woefully ignorant. I enjoy the irony.

What I don't enjoy is getting a link to something that has nothing with what we were discussing, because you did a quick Google search and didn't bother to read it, meanwhile, I, who foolishly took you seriously, read the whole link, only to realize it was a complete waste of my time. Chomsky isn't predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, he's arguing that the Soviet Union wasn't socialist and never was. The "no true Scotsman" fallacy applied to communism. That argument have heard multiple times by socialists.

Therefore you're wrong, begone.

 

Utter garbage. Capitalism is an economic system. What was in play through out the British Raj was mercantilism. A dastardly system in which powerful countries extort supplies from less powerful countries in exchange over priced finished goods. WWI and II along with the trade war between them put and end to Mercantilism once and for all.

 

It's amazing how many lame excuses you hear from apologist about why communism flops ten out of ten times.

I've heard it all:

The whole world needs to be communist for it to succeed!!

Humans need to evolve to make communism successful!!

They weren't doing it right!!!!

It's capitalism's fault!!!!!!

It wasn't communism!!!!

 

When the Soviets relocated that food away from Ukraine there is nothing saying thats a "Communist" thing to do, so why do you blame Communism for that? Right, because it was Communists who did it, just like it was Capitalists who starved out over 100 million Indians. Its a huge double standard to blame everything that goes wrong under Communism ON Communism but than to dodge and play semantics when bad things happen under Capitalism

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Most of those are the exact same excuses he just used for Capitalism

 

It is indeed wrong to blame everything that happens under communism on communism. But the interesting question is not what happens under communism, but wheter it happens because of communism. Surely you'd agree that there's a link between communism and the ukrainian famine either due to the economic inefficiency brought by the communist economics system and/or the desire to weaken ukrainian nationalism, which was part of communist plan to make everyone into soviets. The famine in india on the other hand, has no such links to capitalism. In fact, I've read that one famine in india (I don't know how many there were) was caused by price controls, which is to say, by less capitalism.

 

In effect sir I blamed the leaders Lenin and Stalin for that.
and sorry no I didn't I just told you that Mercantilism and capitalism aren't the same.

 

India has suffered from famines for years. in fact there were a lot of them before Britain had a navy. Let the monsoons be weak or late and you've got food issues.

 

That's a flawless rebuttal that

He says repeatedly that the USSR is a failed state - communism never existed it and the socialist revolution failed under the Bolsheviks.

Its not a "no true scotsman" fallacy at all because they (ie Chomsky and others with this argument worth attention) define what communism is, thereby showing how the USSR was not communist, or socialist, but more likely (and I would agree) state socialist. Communism has never existed. Why? Because you cant have a "communist country." Its a complete oxymoron. Its like saying "I live in under capitalist fascism." No country on earth as far as I am aware has ever, legally, declared itself a communist state. North Korea might have at some point (since they've change what they call themselves internally several times) but they not only include pseudo-religious bs in their state policies, they clearly have no regard for the meaning of any words outside capacity to implement effective propaganda - they call themselves a democracy, for example.
In the same way, capitalism has never existed, only state-capitalism in that regard.

See above. You clearly dont even know what communism is.

 

Ya, with the exception that hardly anyone claims that Capitalism is perfect, far from it. But when you stack it up too Marxist nonsense, ya I'll go with the system that's been around since the caveman.

 

The communist ideology is indeed to spread, not all forms of Communism are about spreading but surely most are, but that doesnt mean "by any means necessary" just because its in our ideology to spread doesnt mean ANYTHING we do to spread is Communistic. Show me anywhere in the Communist Manifesto where it says to spread the Revolution you must starve other countries.......Its not in there, what the Soviets did to the Ukrainians was because many Ukrainians changed sides and fought for Hitler, much like Vichy France did. Russia lost over 25 million people in that war and were extremely pissed off, that famine is Ukraine was not a mismanagement of resources (although im sure that played its role, it was not the key factor) the famine was intentional and there is nothing written by Marx that says to intentionally starve people to spread your ideology, thats utterly ridiculous. What Stalin did was Stalinist, as ive said there is no single doctrine of Communism that we all must follow, we think for ourselves, there are as many forms of Communism as there are Communists.

 

Communism has also been around since the caveman, even before. Both Capitalism and Communism are both found in nature. For example, Bee's are extremely Communistic, they are all essentially assigned jobs, they are all equal, same pay, same food rations, same housing, they are vegetarians wink, they all work as a COMMUNity etc. Spiders however are extremely Capitalistic, they are individualists who work for themselves rather than for a Community, they are only concerned about their personal well-being and not the well-being of others, they will even eat their own children if they get in the way.

Humans cannot escape the bounds of nature, everything we do is entirely natural. We are animals.

 

So everything bad England and America did they did under Mercantilism, and everything good they did was under Capitalism? What the British did to the Indians was done after they dropped Mercantalism and embraced Capitalism,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
"Mercantilist regulations were steadily removed over the course of the Eighteenth Century in Britain, and during the 19th century the British government fully embraced free trade and Smith's laissez-faire economics."

 

Was the French Revolution good or bad?

Depends on how much you want to get a head.

 

The holodomor was in the early 30's. No war then.

Sure, there's many forms of communism. Every form that's been tried has failed, and somehow people want us to give those that never have been tried a chance.

BUt still, the point is, that the ukrainian famine was due to communism. THe indian starvation, was not due to capitalism.