George Blake Dead

[Crazy_Ivan80]

les excuses sont faites pour s'en servir.

I wonder how many more dead people are required to discredit communism once and for all?

But no, instead people are still making excuses for that system just because it and its proponents managed to wrap it and themselves with misplaced moral righteousness. Not unlike all those earlier fanatics that believe(d) they were/are making a better world for everyone... except for those countless of course that had/have a different view of what that better world entailed/s.

At least fascism was sufficiently discredited that it no longer is able to invoke morals as an argument. Time that communism undergoes the same as the road to utopia is paved with far too many skulls

[Berkut]

les excuses sont faites pour s'en servir.

I wonder how many more dead people are required to discredit communism once and for all?

But no, instead people are still making excuses for that system just because it and its proponents managed to wrap it and themselves with misplaced moral righteousness. Not unlike all those earlier fanatics that believe(d) they were/are making a better world for everyone... except for those countless of course that had/have a different view of what that better world entailed/s.

At least fascism was sufficiently discredited that it no longer is able to invoke morals as an argument. Time that communism undergoes the same as the road to utopia is paved with far too many skulls

What a load of bullshit. Nobody here is arguing that communism has not been discredited.

Surely this is obvious, right?

[Eddie Teach]

I think Tyr is suggesting that it hasn't really been tried.

[Sheilbh]

I think this is very interesting by the way.

There may be utility in inventing theories to explain what politicians did, but I have no idea how that applies to the question under consideration (whether  fascist and Soviet states were equally true to their ideological goals).  I think it much easier to explain Hitler in terms of fascism than Stalin in terms of Marxism.

Possibly, but I would focus on Marxism-Leninism which is the ideological core of Stalin and most Communist states.

The NEP was Lenin's solution to the impossibility of creating a successful command economy, as recent experience (War Communism) had shown.

But it was a temporary solution to the ability to extract enough grain from the peasants to feed the urban centres and to industrialise (which relied on Russian grain exports). I believe Lenin described it as a "peasant Brest-Litovsk" and was always vague about when it should but clear that it was temporary - I think he at one point said it should maybe last for a decade for a little more, at another said that 25 years was too pessimistic. But Lenin wasn't like Bukharin on this who did think it could be semi-permanent and the USSR could reach communism through capitalism.

The issue with the NEP from an ideological perspective was that it needed to succeed in order for the USSR to industrialise (and face its external class enemies) but if it succeeded then because of the way it worked it would mean a stronger kulak/strong peasant group in the countryside (strengthening internal class enemies). I think Stalin ending the NEP was his way of addressing that threat (and also avoid a recurrence of Trotsky's scissor crisis). It's not a repudiation of Lenin, it's just speeding up the stage at which the NEP must be ended.

There are, indeed, historians who doubt the authenticity of the testament, but no one at the time did, which I think is the more compelling evidence.  And Lenin's complaints against people other than Stalin are far from damning.

So I think Lenin's testament matters because people at the time thought it was real and it was something that kept coming up through the twenties, but I think it's more difficult to place to much emphasis on them as Lenin's views or feelings. I think Lenin's aside about Trotsky's "non-Bolshevism" was possibly more damning in the rest of the 20s.

Now, there's no question that Lenin valued Stalin's work ethic and bureaucratic sense, and that Stalin wouldn't have gotten the position of Secretary-General in 1922 without Lenin's consent.  But Lenin never engaged Stalin in any intellectual discussions the way he did the others (especially Trotsky).  Stalin seems to have been seen as just a good apparatchik, until he got real power as the SG and apparently offended people with his arrogance.

Agreed - but I think this is why I think Stalin follows in Lenin's footsteps (except on nationalities where he did challenge Lenin and felt able to speak authoritatively). Stalin is the good, diligent auto-didactic student who I don't think ever really significantly strays from Lenin or sort of logical next steps. Lenin and Trotsky are intellectually brilliant and original thinkers - Lenin transforms Marxism into something new and Trotsky is similar. Stalin just takes what Lenin did to their conclusion with little originality.

Although I think the emphasis on Stalin's work ethic and bureaucratic skill leans a little too much on Trotsky's take on what happened which is partly a self-justification for why Trotsky lost. I think it creates the sense of Stalin as that grey blur you don't notice until it's too late. There's something of that but I think it misses his charm/comradeship with others in the leadership and the cadres that made them like him against Trotsky's showboating and the intellectual side that he never saw himself as Lenin's equal to spar with or transform (as Trotsky did). Stalin was just there to follow through Lenin's thoughts as the party wanted.

I think that you are seeing romanticism in the Leninist movement because you see romanticism everywhere! 

Fair

Lenin used violence, and advocated using violence.  But he advocated violence as necessary for revolutionary success, not because he had some romantic view of violence as being this "cleansing act" that would rejuvenate the populace and  unite them.  He personally did, I think, become enamored with the idea of using violence to solve problems even as his advisors tried to get him to consider the unintended consequences, and he wrote about his shame concerning this late in his life.  Power corrupts.

I don't know I think the entire milieu in revolutionary Russia from the Bolsheviks to the Black Hundreds had quite a romantic view of the necessity and benefits of violence. I suppose that is a difference because the Fascists are unusual in their political contexts in their approach to violence. Whereas I think the Bolsheviks aren't.

I guess I can only counter your argument by assertion with my counter-argument-by-assertion, that nothing in Lenin's writings before the revolution required the Red Terror, nor the Great Terror, nor the starvation of the peasants leading to the deaths of tens of millions, nor the utter destruction of the environment.  Those resulted from conscious choices to ignore the Marxist-Leninist principals of equality and justice, in pursuit of naked power.  Lenin himself admitted as much, in terms of the acts he carried out.  I'd also note that Lenin was careful to allow dissent and didn't execute, exile, imprison, or slander those in the party who disagreed with him.  He didn't use violence for its own sake, as Stalin did.

But if we're saying the Red Terror isn't in line with Leninism then Lenin isn't a Leninist. I think the principals of equality and justice are the Marxist bit of Marxism-Leninism and the how do we get there is the Leninist bit. I think without that and especially the emphasis on the dictatorship of the party and mercilessness to enemies, there is no real difference between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.

[Josquius]

I think Tyr is suggesting that it hasn't really been tried.

Well that's a right wing cliche.

[Eddie Teach]

Explain, please.

[Josquius]

Explain, please.

"Lefties always say real socialism/communism (the former if its a particular idiot speaking) hasn't been tried cos they don't want to admit it always fails" is a very common off the shelf put down. Seen far more often than people who actually claim this.
Usually said as you did here completely berift of any relevant context.

If that's not what you meant then I'm sorry and you'll have to explain what you meant a bit more.

[Eddie Teach]

Well, it certainly wasn't a put down. But if the USSR wasn't fully realized communism, what is then?

[PDH]

Communism seems to work great - in premodern foraging groups that number around 30 people max.  No property, no leadership (except task-based), with sharing of duties.

[Josquius]

Well, it certainly wasn't a put down. But if the USSR wasn't fully realized communism, what is then?

A Marxist socialist (officially) /state capitalist (less officially but often very much so) dictatorship.
I'm not familiar with any communist ideology country that has ever claimed to have actually achieved communism. The march towards the future perfect state of communism was a frequent feature of their propeganda.

[Razgovory]

I think Brezhnev claimed that the Soviet Union achieved communism.

[Berkut]

Well, it certainly wasn't a put down. But if the USSR wasn't fully realized communism, what is then?

I think most sane people realize that "real communism" is a chimera - something that isn't even possible in the manner in which it is described, and the effort to achieve it results in the need for the state to exercise a level of compulsion that is largely authoritarian and typically grossly violent.

There are some people, for sure, who seem to be actual "communists" who think that this is somehow achievable, and do in fact say things like "communism hasn't been tried because the capitalists always sabotage it!". And those people should be mocked unmercifully.

But just because SOME people make a argument of a particular form, doesn't mean that ALL people making an argument with a similar form are doing so for the same reasons.

[Josquius]

I do believe that "communism"  is fairly inevitable in the future. We are either headed for a star trek federation style post scarcity society  or complete bust and the end of civilization.
Marxism though has been shown to not be the way to this path. Even if we hadn't had various Marxist regimes in the 20th century it's pretty clearly outdated in the modern world where 10 men can do the work of 10,000 and consumption rather than production is the commodity.
Though I guess it could be argued from marxs side to give him a little credit (still not enough to be right however given what we know about the advance of technology) is it was never tried "properly" : always emerging in the less developed parts of the world like Russia rather than in the UK as he expected.

I think Brezhnev claimed that the Soviet Union achieved communism.

When?
I know he said the age of communism is nigh and would be reached within 20 years et al but pretty sure he backtracked on that as it was shown to be overly optimistic.

[The Minsky Moment]

"Marxism" was never a tightly coherent body of political theory.  Marx was a philosophy student turned journalist turned pamphleteer and professional radical and his written work reflects this.  The Communist Manifesto is rhetorical critique of contemporary society  using a vaguely Hegelian historical template and a list of a programmatic demands tacked on, demands that to the extent are comprehensible today are descriptive of a social democratic program.  Capital is a confusing mix of reporting on contemporary factory conditions and an attempt to rework Ricardian economics. His other essays similarly combine reportage and commentary on current events with a mish mosh of political and economic theorization.

It's hard to derive any concrete program from Marx's writings and to the extent he made predictions about the development of European capitalism based on his theory, in the decades following his death, it became apparent those predictions were incorrect or at least badly incomplete. It's no surprise therefore that would-be Marxists ever since have wrestled with this material and differed about its meaning. 

In the early 20th century, revisionism (Bernsteinism) emerged as a dominant force and indeed remains so.  Modern day parliamentary socialist and social democratic parties in Europe are descendants of the late 19th century Marxist social democratic movements and parties that took the revisionist turn - and in this sense it could be claimed that Marxism as revised succeeded. If you look at the few programmatic concretes of Marx - namely the specific goals listed in the Manifesto like graduated income taxation, inheritance taxation, central banking, free education, child labor bans, state control over key utilities etc. - social democratic parliamentary parties in the West made very significant progress towards those goals. While for the most part they did not do so through the kinds of revolutionary transition envisioned by Marx, these political developments unfolded in a manner that could be described using a dialetical metaphor or the metaphor of "contradictions of capitalism"

Revisionism thrived because it provided answers to the obvious fact that worker immisersation was not intensifying in Europe (as Marx predicted would happen as the causal trigger for revolution) but apparently ameliorating somewhat and that workers were making real inroads politically through participation in parliamentary politics, and socially and economically through trade unionism. Lenin defined himself and his thought in direct opposition to revisionism.  It is explicit in "What is to be Done" where the opening remarks present the work as a response and refutation of Bernstein.  Leninism is the mirror image of revision: instead of Marxism being brought to fruition in leading western economies by broad based mass worker movements working through free parliamentary politics, it would instead emerge in "backwards" nations by the leadership of a small elite revolutionary clique operating through revolutionary violence.

Leninism is pretty nonsensical as political theory generally and also as a good faith and just interpretation of Marx, which probably contributed to the historical struggles of the Bolsheviks to attract a mass following (as compared to say the SRs).  However, as a program for seizing power in a chaotic political environment, Leninist vanguardism definitely had legs.  I can see why it would be attractive to frustrated youth and intellectuals desperate to put their ideas into action at any cost and take revenge against their real and perceived tormentors; it also has attraction to criminal opportunists for obvious reasons.  But for a would-be western intellectual seeking justification according to Marxist ideals, there really is no excuse.

[Admiral Yi]

Why do you need an inheritance tax if all property is owned by the state?  Or was that an intermediate step?