Hello, Communism is, by far, the most vile ideology humanity has ever devised. Beginning with the rape and slaughter of the Romanov family, to the 20 million murdered by Joseph Stalin, to the 45 million murdered by Chairman Mao, to our present day Kim in North Korea, no other ideology can match communism's brutal savagery and pure evil. The avatar photo is of Maria Romanov, who was shot in the thigh, bayoneted, and then beaten in the face with rifle butts until she died an hour later ... all under direct orders from Vladimir Lenin in 1918. I would disagree, Communism ideology didn't initialy planned to mass killing. What made communism among the most dangerous ideology is that the bases are not malevolent. By the way, I don't believe in the "true communism was never tried" crap, if communism had the same consequences everywhere in the world, their is reasons inherent to this ideology. Wanting communism in 1900 could have been legitimate, wanting communism as soon communist crime were known is stupidity.
I believe communism initially had noble goals. That is as charitable as I can be. But in the real world, communism is pure evil. It violates human nature at every level. The only way it can survive is with brutal oppression and murder. Personal freedom is completely eliminated "for the greater good".
I totally agree on that. However, I would consider as the most evil ideology Islam. The history of communism could be really simply summed up by that expression ": "The floor of hell is made of good intentions" I don't know if you use that expression in the US. The only respect I have for soviet country were their ability to send the first man in space and create the first man made sattelite, even if millions of death doesn't worth that.
Well, Your Highness, what is communism? I'm not asking what communist ideology is. I'm asking how Marx defined communism, i.e. communist society. And I think we must agree that his definition was that it would be a classless society in which the state machinery has "withered away" and that it would evolve naturally after socialism existed long enough for the classes to vanish as the capitalist class finally gave up all hope and disappeared. So according to the definition of communism and its development, it would only happen after socialism and it would gradually "appear". IOW it can not be imposed on a society because classes cannot be ended by decree. Given that, and given that there has never been a socialist society that became so settled and functional that it lasted long enough for that process to occur, that alone should tell you there has never been a communist society, either. So therefore "communism was never tried" because it cannot be imposed, and we cannot say that "communism is pure evil". We don't know and can't know because communism has never existed. You referenced "communist ideology" but your words imply that you meant the historical strategy of Marxists who worked to seize state power, and did. It was a "top-down" strategy that had the seizure of state power as it's first goal. All the other evils that trouble us resulted from that strategy. And for that reason that strategy has been abandoned my many or most serious Marxists. Communism was only a very distant dream to Marxists. They call themselves "communists" because that is their ultimate goal in 2000 or 3000 years from now when socialism has resulted in classes withering away. So "wanting communism" is a fools game. We need to focus on "wanting socialism" and work to develop it. THAT is what is realistic.
Margot, I have liked possibly all your posts or at least most of them. But in this case let's be clear. Only honest and truthful clarity can stand successfully against propaganda. What is "communist ideology"? Let's compare your answer to Marxism? And in this case that is so heavily targeted by false propaganda, let's use language rigorously. Are you game?
And ? Sure they sold a lot of things, people for instance. Anyway, If I think Islam is the most vile ideology, it's not because it's close of communism but for different reasons. Anyway, it's not the reason of this topic, we talk of that enough on other places of this forum.
Texas Republican is a member of this forum. "Texas Republican" is the username of someone on this forum. The first who answered.
Start with a definition.. Marxism is a political and economic theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis for the theory and practice of communism.
Marxism is summed up in the Encarta Reference Library as “a theory in which class struggle is a central element in the analysis of social change in Western societies.” Marxism is the antithesis of capitalism which is defined by Encarta as “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, characterized by a free competitive market and motivation by profit.” Marxism is the system of socialism of which the dominant feature is public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Under capitalism, the proletariat, the working class or “the people,” own only their capacity to work; they have the ability only to sell their own labor. According to Marx a class is defined by the relations of its members to the means of production. He proclaimed that history is the chronology of class struggles, wars, and uprisings. Under capitalism, Marx continues, the workers, in order to support their families are paid a bare minimum wage or salary. The worker is alienated because he has no control over the labor or product which he produces. The capitalists sell the products produced by the workers at a proportional value as related to the labor involved. Surplus value is the difference between what the worker is paid and the price for which the product is sold. An increasing immiseration of the proletariat occurs as the result of economic recessions; these recessions result because the working class is unable to buy the full product of their labors and the ruling capitalists do not consume all of the surplus value. A proletariat or socialist revolution must occur, according to Marx, where the state (the means by which the ruling class forcibly maintains rule over the other classes) is a dictatorship of the proletariat. Communism evolves from socialism out of this progression: the socialist slogan is “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” The communist slogan varies thusly: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” https://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/what-is-marxism-faq.htm
Good. I'll offer a small but important modification: Marxism is a political and economic theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis for the theory and practice of ending capitalism and beginning a path to socialism. What do you think?
PERFECT! That is 100% accurate. The problem is only in the right wing insistence on "subtly" adding words to that, thinking they are making it "clear" when in fact they spin and distort it to serve their bias.
I don't know that I disagree or agree. However I can state that although communism as an ideology did not state in a frank manner that it was calling for genocide the ideology as written by Marx did in fact set the conditions for genocide. Marx specifically called for a dictatorship of the proletariat as part of the process leading to the end goal of a stateless classless society. I do not know if it was ignorance or willful ingenuity but he somehow convinced people that adding the words OF THE PROLETARIAT after the words dictatorship would make it somehow benign and peaceful. When in fact he specifically meant control of all people and things through a dictatorship which historically means bloodshed and slavery and tyranny. That is what all dictatorships have in common. This is the blind spot so many adherents of communism have. The crap about true communism never being achieved ignores this fact and others. Another fact they ignore is that communism is not and was never meant to be a perfect society. It is not even a noun. Communism is a verb specifically process toward the goal and in that sense the USSR and Mao's China and Cambodia and North Korea and Cuba and all the others were truly communist nations because they simply established the genocidal dictatorship while working towards the ultimate goal just as Marx planned. Some say communism was formulated out of noble ideas I disagree with that as well. There is nothing noble about slavery and slavery is n fact what Marx had in mind for the stateless classless society. Essentially " from each according to his ability and to each according to his need ", means that you are slave to the masses. Your ability is not yours it belongs to humanity for the good of others. And this is truly evil. It is irrelevant if your owner and master is one man with a whip or the rest of the human race. A slave is a slave and that is what Marx was preaching
@Soupnazi I think it's important to remember the context of the XIXth century in europe. The industrialization of Europe provoked the apparition of a huge poverty. Most european countries were monarchy or in political turmoil. The few republics in europe were tax based voting system, and you had to pay a lot of taxes to be allowed to vote.
I have in fact considered that and the reality is that poverty decreased dramatically in the 19th century. The monarchy was in turmoil because it was weak and the common man was growing stronger and better educated and calling for more democratic leadership. Industrialization helped more than hurt along with capitalism and better education which did in fact increase in europe in that century..
Better education happened only during the late 19th century when mandatory and public schools appeared. The situation improved in the countryside, but in the cities it's rather the opposite, big concentrations of population are often the big concentration of poverty.
The concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was developed by Marx in response to his observation of the results of 1848 in France, where the peasantry, and 'petty bourgeoisie' first joined with the urban working class to overthrow the monarchy, but then turned against the revolutionary government when it began a series of socialistic measures to help the urban unemployed. The peasantry and other small-property-owners, and allied social layers, outnumbered the actual working class, and later were overwhelmingly in favor of Louis Bonaparte, who became, effectively, a dictator. A summary of 1848 in France can be found here. Thus Marx theorized that the working class would have to take and hold power, despite lacking support from the peasant majority of the population. The word 'dictatorship' can be misleading. Remember that a limited franchise, excluding whole classes of the population, was the norm in Europe at that time. (The whole question of the phrase 'dictatorship of the proletariat' has been extensively explored by the late Hal Draper, in a book of that name, Volume III of an extensive analysis of Marx's theory of revolution, available here.) Marx's class dictatorship was perfectly compatible with being exercised by an elected parliament, with free speech and multiple parties -- but not one in which other social classes beside the urban proletariat would have a vote. (Think of the British parliament for much of the 19th Century, which was a kind of reverse 'dictatorship of the proletariat' -- you had to be a property owner to vote. But we wouldn't call it a dictatorship in the sense that, say, one was established when the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran was overthrown in a CIA operation, or the bloody tyranny established when the democratically-elected socialist Allende was overthrown and replaced by General Pinochet, with the passive if not active support of the US.) Of course many people are in favor of dictatorships, especially for others. The United States has supported many of them, and even created a few.
I learned it as a small child in the South as: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Quite similar to yours.
Marx said that the conversion to socialism would happen in the industrialized countries like the USA first, and then it would spread to less industrialized countries and then to those where capitalism was not yet the economic form. They would jump from a essentially feudal economy to a socialist one. So how you get peasants involved I don't know. Today, I see "the dictatorship of the proletariat" as meaning a dictatorship over capitalists to stop them from being capitalists.
Yes, Marx did not envisage the working class coming to power in a society where it was a small minority, and an economically and socially backward society at that. At most -- I think you find this in correspondence between Engels and Vera Zasulich -- it was envisaged that an advanced, socialist Europe might pull societies like Russia into socialism, and that the Russian mir system (a kind of collective ownership) would be an advantage in this. Marx also thought that the growth of capitalism would also make the proportion of proletarians grow, so eventually 'the dictatorship of the proletariat' would be the 'dictatorship' of a majority over the minority. All social revolutions and civil wars, and indeed just plain old wars, involve the restriction of liberty. So it's not technically wrong to say that socialism has never been tried in the proper environment: an advanced country. But we now have enough evidence that a planned economy is extremely inefficient, unlike Marx's belief that it would exceed capitalism in the development of the productive forces. So, hopefully, we're not going to see this disastrous experiment repeated any more. (The 'socialism' of today's college students is just the desire to have the Norweigan health care system, which is perfectly compatible with capitalism. Plus it's good for winding up their parents.)
I translate from french, your match better with the proverb in french. Even if in french it's the hell who is paved with good intentions, not the road do hell.
