The older I get (85 in a month), the more I think Marx was right. And that means the Communists in China and Russia were wrong. I will stick with Orwell, whose critique of totalitarianism (1984/Animal Farm) exposes the lies of the monster (as Khruschev called Stalin) who ruled the Soviet Union for decades in total defiance of Marx. And as for Mao, he was a another psychopath who, fortunately, has been succeeded by wise rulers who have brought China out of the cesspool created by Mao and rule with patience and moderation.
I am closer to being a communist (in the Marxian sense) than ever in my life, but those who ran things in China and the Soviet Union did so in total disregard for Marx's view that communism could only arise in a mature capitalist society, never in a poor, semi-feudal backwater like Russia or China.
I think the Soviet criticism of the West was basically correct and the Western criticism by Orwell and others was correct about the terrible flaws of the Soviet Union. Today's communist leaders are moderate and pragmatic, playing the long game. They understand that before there can be communism, there must be industrialization, concentrations of wealth, and the contradictions of capitalism must play out. Neither Stalin nor Mao understood this and their ignorance led to vicious criminality.
If we say the communists were right, it is imperative to say which ones: those most right were eliminated as traitors. Trotsky got an ax in the skull; and in China, hundreds of thousands of CCP officials were persecuted; many died through execution, suicide under duress, or prison abuse.
See The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 — Frank Dikötter
Focus: Ground-level purge violence
Strengths:
Based on newly opened Chinese archives.
Shows how mass denunciations and killings unfolded locally.
Details torture, struggle sessions, executions.
Part of Dikötter’s trilogy on Maoist campaigns."
I suggest avoiding blanket generalizations and defining terms. I suggest not taking sides. In doing so we betray the truth, for both sides lie alongside some accurate criticism. There is only one thing worth fighting for, and that is peace (Camus), and there is only one party worth joining, and that is the party of truth. And all the while, let us be humble and admit that we make mistakes and then learn from them. That is what the best in the West (democratic socialists et al) and in the communist universe have done.
If you put this in context with what capitalist nations have been doing during the same time, and ignore Western-biased sources, you find that much of this is propaganda, and represents and incomplete story.
Mao is the reason China is an independent state and not languishing in poverty like India. Stalin, for being a dictator, in context defeated the Nazis who invaded the USSR and killed 20+ million people, while also facing hostile Western isolation, and eventually remilitarization for Europe, the creation of NATO absorbing the remains of Nazi West Germany into it. Tense times.
"When Plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in society, over the course of time they will create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it"
-Frederic Bastiat
***
The Truth is, modern capitalist world would not exist without colonialism and the drain of resources (incl. slaves) from the colonies..
"Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter"
-Old African proverb
***
"Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence."
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
***
"Imperialism meant Capitalism expansion. It meant that European Capitalists were forced by the internal logic of their competitive system to seek abroad in less developed countries, opportunities to control raw materials, to find markets, and find profitable field of investment"
-Walter Rodney, "How Europe underdeveloped Africa", 1972
One of the Key principles of Imperialism is to keep the colonies underdeveloped (or more precisely, overexploited). It's called "unequal exchange relations".
Thus the products of colonies (resources) are consistently undervalued, and the products of metropolis (Tech/Industrial goods) are consistently overvalued.
That's why the Brits destroyed the textile industry in India - they forced them to import the textile from Britain, where capitalists were already in the crisis of overproduction":
Observe the capital flows of the British Empire. Wealth generated from the colonies of Asia, India, Africa, and Caribbean were used to solely develop North America, Europe, and Oceania.
***
That's why people in Western countries work the fewest hours, while receive the highest wages:
Well said, Ian Brown. China lifting millions out of poverty and now surpassing the west - in values and technology - is the natural progression from Mao. The same goes for Stalin for making possible the Soviet Union, for Putin now to stand to win a proxy war against the US/NATO. If Gorbachov too wasn't blinded by western propaganda, they could have reformed the Soviet Union.
Generations go on handing down the propaganda. Myths do live on.
All three, I have read something interesting from Marx about that very project and it was a project. Marx actually told all three they would fail not having gone through the steps. Avoiding Capitalism did not allow innovation and technology to advance. Which I can understand. I would love to see that in Marx's own handwriting though ha. Makes perfect sense seeing what we see from history and current event's. The question for me and for you, have we stayed with Capitalism so long we have no flexibility to move to Communism. The Chinese seem to be on the path if we let them continue. Can the Chinese now move to Communism or will they fall victim to Capitalism? Love to know what you think.
"From The Communist Manifesto (1848), by Marx and Engels:
“The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.”
And further:
“It has created enormous cities… vastly increased the urban population… created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”
Marx’s point: capitalism builds the industrial capacity communism will later inherit.
3) Capitalism produces its own successor
Also from The Communist Manifesto:
“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.”
Capitalism creates the proletariat — the class that can overthrow it.
4) Historical sequencing of modes of production
From Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
“No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed.”
This is one of Marx’s clearest formulations:
A system (like capitalism) must fully develop productive capacity before it can be replaced.
5) Capitalism centralizes production — enabling socialism
From Capital, Volume I:
“Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital… grows the mass of misery… but with this too grows the revolt of the working class… trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.”
Capitalism unintentionally organizes the workforce needed for socialist transformation.
What Marx did not argue
He did not believe:
Poor peasant societies could leap directly to communism
Agrarian economies had the productive base for socialism
Revolution should bypass industrialization
That’s why Marx expected socialist revolution first in:
Britain
Germany
Advanced capitalist economies
Not in Russia or China — which he saw as economically premature.
Capitalism is historically necessary — not morally good, but materially indispensable — because it creates the productive abundance communism requires."
That is understood by current Chinese leaders who have incorporated a huge capitalist private sector into the development of China, viewed as necessary to prepare for the transition in the future to communisml
Centralizing production does not lead to local democracy... it leads to totalitarianism, whether capitalist or commie.. real commies live independently of central authority... I mean if we haven't learned that yet......
Look at all the previous famines in China. Each was pretty comparable in devastation to the 1959 save they also weren't coming out of an extremely brutal 20th Century war. By that time they had not yet been able dig themselves out of the 150+ year hole, esp under global sanction, and being denied official nationhood in the UN (Republic of China taking the seat).
It is established that some was exacerbated by mismanagement and experiments with collective farming that didn't really work out, but again not a whole lot worse from previous famines before communism or Mao.
Ultimately the introduction of markets was necessary to generate wealth, but they would not have been able to control them without the party state that Mao established, and would have reverted to exploited status.
Yeah, I'm sure that odious Western freedom of speech and press would have REALLY fucked that up even WORSE!
"Allow markets"
??? What's this, are there now Marxist markets? I suppose as long as a self-selected "expert" vanguard stealth manipulator sets the rules. Is that how it works?
Propaganda is found everywhere. It relies on self-appointed power-grabbing "experts" like yourself to grabbing bullhorns and be pulling cons perpetually. It relies on maximization of Aristotle's ethos over logos.
Oh, another wordsmithing 3-card monte player. No, I do not think "the press is free"; whatever that sequence of words means here, but I am confident FUD is your objective (it works like the switcheroo FUD of "illegal alien" and "no human is illegal").
I believe in "freedom of the press" and "freedom of speech". Wikipedia, for all its faults, is probably good enough here.
"Have you heard of market socialism[?]"
I believe in capitalist-socialist hybrids, truly democratically run. From my reading, Marx and descendants are quite allergic to the idea of pure democracy, whatever they tout in public and on their banners.
'Who is "yourself?"'
I dunno. Still working on that. Don't my crazed posts tell you what you need to know? Or is your objective here to keep me from speaking, because I never mastered the arts of manipulation?
On the contrary, it took a radical shift from the deep economic hole Mao dug, to start the engine of Chinese prosperity and advance. Nor did Stalin make the Soviet Union possible. With such views, perhaps you should do some study before making claims that counter histrory
The uber-capitalist psychopathic globalists contributed to that, just as much as China did. But now the former's plan to hollow out America and move to greener pastures is blowing up in their faces, in the form of populism all over the West.
But now China has its *own* grinding capitalist machine run by a dictatorship! Yippee!! Yes, do stay tuned to China and see how it goes from here. My only fear is that now that they've been cross-pollinating with capitalists, when they blow up you'll be able to blame the Westerners exclusively.
"Mao is the reason China is an independent state and not languishing in poverty like India."
Not following you here... China languished in poverty from the time Mao took over, all the way until his death more than a quarter-century later, and then some.
As a teenager, I asked my dad why he was a commie, and got the answer which later in life made me a commie too, and still am, after so much studying and fighting; he said, smiling: " because Communism is justice. And freedom".
First, Mao is the reason China is independent and the Century of Humiliation didn't continue.
Second, look at every single metric from life expectancy, literacy, wealth, etc etc all took off with Mao. Look at China before Mao, and after. The dividing line is right there.
People always say that it was Deng "embracing" capitalism that changed everything. Yet India embraced capitalism from its independence, and look at it now.
"Mao is the reason China is independent and the Century of Humiliation didn't continue."
But it did live in poverty for many decades. With a continuation of th famines that drove people to flee, as well as that lovely re-invigoration, the "Cultural Revolution", until...
"People always say that it was Deng 'embracing' capitalism that changed everything... "
But it did. This is the thing that it appears Marxists studiously ignore. I can only conclude that the cog-dis must be overwhelming.
"... Yet India embraced capitalism from its independence, and look at it now."
Cultural differences. Also, India's globalist upper classes are doing very well, thank you.
Look, Marxism simply does not address any number of facts about human nature. And, believe me, I have less than zero love for unfettered capitalism.
Again, China started in extreme poverty, coming out of colonial domination and a brutal war, and was isolated from the world economic system at behest of the capitalist powers. They had to build from essentially zero. Not sure why you think it's some kind of win that it took them a while to dig themselves out of that hole after they broke the colonial chains.
India is not because of a cultural difference. It is because Deng specifically introduced controlled markets as a way of having trade integration with the world (which was cut off) and generating wealth with the global system that exists, so that they could direct it to their development priorities. This was always led by the communist party and under their control. Without Mao building the foundation, they would have been just as unable to control their destiny as India, they would have been overrun, kept in poverty and without development.
"Not sure why you think it's some kind of win that it took them a while to dig themselves out of that hole after they broke the colonial chains."
That's not quite what think happened, or rather, what I mean...
The transition away from Communist dictatorship could only occur, and did occur, only (a few years) after a specific person -- Mao -- was removed. That is not an organic process of growing out of poverty, five-year plans notwithstanding (or are they rewriting *that* history, too?) For example, the new rulers quite consciously removed restrictions on low-level internal trade (e.g. street vendors).
The important thing about that had an *ideological* effect on the common people, specifically to question what communism was actually advocating, if all of a sudden they could themselves participate in the same free trade that was previously demonized. This was (known to be) a proven-successful path to *material* success, even if cultural aspects, including materially equality, could suffer. But the powers-that-be had already made such a horrific mess of that in the Cultural Revolution, it was a rather easy choice.
This assumes China could not have been industrialized without Mao's fatal autoarky and failed economic policies, which later leaders proved WAS possible.
'human nature' (usually referring to psychological traits) is largely malleable and not a real argument, imo. marxism actually starts off from 'human nature' (basic necessities) and real material conditions (the 'economy').
" 'It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.' / Meaning: results over doctrine."
Excellent! I'm glad you're blue-pilled into rejecting doctrine. Now we can get to work into real stuff, which permits a full-democratic taking from: socialism (Leftism; France's 'egalite') *AND* capitalism (Rightism; France's 'liberte') *AND* most especially, culture (Nationalism; France's 'fraternite')
The last of these, culture, was apparently chucked wholesale during Marx's FUD-ing of nationhood. He seemed to think ignoring it verbally, while simultaneously creating intra-national *wars*, would make it go away :/ But here we are again, with nationalist populism breaking out all over the place...
Mao used humiliation and torture to enforce his power: "Humiliation was one of the central tools used during the Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao Zedong. It wasn’t incidental — it was systematic, public, and politically purposeful.
Here’s how it functioned.
1) “Struggle sessions” — ritualized public humiliation
Targets (teachers, officials, intellectuals, “class enemies”) were forced into mass denunciation meetings.
Common features:
Forced confessions
Public shouting and insults
Physical intimidation
Beatings in some cases
Crowds chanting accusations
Victims were made to admit ideological crimes — often fabricated.
Purpose:
Break resistance
Produce submission
Demonstrate revolutionary power
2) Degrading physical postures
Victims were often forced into stress positions, especially the infamous:
“Airplane position”
Bent forward
Arms twisted upward behind the back
It was painful, humiliating, and visually theatrical.
People were displayed like criminals even when no legal charges existed.
3) “Dunce caps” and placards
Targets were paraded wearing:
Tall dunce hats
Placards listing alleged crimes
Labels like “counter-revolutionary,” “capitalist roader,” “traitor”
They were marched through streets or workplaces for public ridicule.
4) Forced self-denunciation writings
Victims had to write:
Confession statements
Self-criticisms
Ideological repentance essays
Refusal could escalate punishment.
These documents were often read aloud to crowds.
5) Attacks on personal dignity
Humiliation extended beyond meetings:
Homes ransacked
Family heirlooms destroyed
Books burned
Hair cut publicly
Glasses broken (symbol of intellectualism)
It was meant to strip social identity, not just political position.
6) Children denouncing parents
In extreme cases:
Students denounced teachers
Children denounced parents
Spouses denounced each other
This inverted Confucian social hierarchies — intentionally.
It demonstrated loyalty to Mao over family bonds."
I can write you an essay how the capitalists did subversion, infiltration, sabotage and corruption in China and every other country that didn't bow to capitalism. The counterrevolution is still trying to weaken China, so how to fight the enemy within your society?
Marx, said you have to go through Capitalism to create a Communist system. I remember reading he scolded Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin for not staying the course. Seems Marx was right looking at China today.
Could that be part of a process to success which you have to admit China is. They are not Communists yet however they I believe are on a far better path is we let them. I have no idea where we in the u.s. are going, Fascism?
The Communist Party claims China is a socialist nation on the path to communism. Communism is a vision of a world without alienation or oppression, stateless, classless, and without circulating money, a society based on participatory democracy without the need for centralized power. This is progress by contradicion to fill in the missing elements of dialetical materialism, explaining why Communist nations enable a private sector to help build wealth, industrialize, and create job, deliberately inserting a private sector to produce the industrialized, wealthy nations Marx saw as the seedbed of the transition through socialism to communism.
The question that haunts political scientists and great thinkers like Arendt and Orwell is whether powerful ruling elites, the vanguard or the dictatorship of the workers, can ever relinquish power, which has its own seductive power to induce a mentality not of surrendering but of holding on and seeking more. Can an ideology of building great power and seeing it "wither away" withstand the aphrodesiac of power? WE cannot reject a future we do not know but it is unlikely and so there may be a further dialectic after capitalism in which state socialism ( often wrongly called state capitalism, which is a contradiction in terms, unless we mean corporate fascism, the enemy of socialism) forms a new contradiction, leading to a further resolution beyond what we see today.
Stalin generously put the Russian people in the path of the Nazi War Machine. They did stop the machine, and at great cost. More regard for the nation than for it's people as other genocides make clear.
This is kind of nonsense, though. The Nazis explicit goal from the beginning, and the reason Hitler was supported by New York and London early on was to fight communism. The Lebensraum project was always to take place in the USSR which Hitler compared to the Indian populated prairies of North America, ripe for colonization.
Millions and millions of people died before the Soviets were able to raise a large enough army to fight back and drive Hitler back home to Berlin. They defeated the Nazis almost single handedly, and along with China, bore the largest sacrifice of fighting fascism.
Could Trotsky have pulled victory from the jaws of defeat and saved Europe and the world from the Nazis?
Would Trotsksy have been so stupid as to make a deal with the treacherous Nazis and then be totally unprepared for the invasion. I doubt it since Trotsky was a military genius and "When the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution (1917), they had no functioning national army. Trotsky built one almost from scratch.////Under his leadership, the Red Army defeated multiple anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War (1917–1922).
So while not a battlefield tactician in the traditional sense, he was the regime’s principal military organizer and strategist.
How Trotsky viewed the Nazi–Soviet Pact
He was fiercely hostile to it.
The pact — formally the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939) — was signed between:
Joseph Stalin
Adolf Hitler
It included:
Non-aggression terms
Secret protocols dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence
All the Western European countries attempted the same thing. Nobody wanted a war with Germany. The Soviets had just fought off a multi-front invasion during the Civil War.
But sure, the USSR could have charged in through Eastern Europe to save the day in the 1930s.
Sorry, not an expert on WW2. But from the docs i've seen, the west pumped a lot of military gear into the USSR. They kinda became the proxy for weakening Germany, and they paid the price... But as you say, the Nazis were going to ethnically cleanse the whole area.
From their perspective and Europe's, they were not the proxy, but the main event, and the primary target of the Reich who considered slavs to be untermenschen and had plans for establishing aryan lebensraum in the East. Whatever temporary help the received from the other Allies (immediately cut off at the end of the war along with any notion of helping with reconstruction) the Soviets provided the bulk of the manpower, industrial power, and recourses that defeated the Nazis.
The US pretty much swooped in from France at the 11th hour when Germany was already starting to collapse and then claimed they won the whole thing. USSR won the war mostly on it's own, though Yugoslavia and the Greek communists also drove the Nazis out of their regions.
As this chart show, the “progress” in GDP came at the expense of vast suffering, while India kept pace, and the real takeoff was after MAO was dead and new leaders totally took a different approach to improving the standard of living.
Under Mao, China became poorer than India: "Mao is not the reason China escaped poverty.
In fact, Mao-era China was:
extremely poor
technologically backward
frequently starving
Hard facts:
Great Leap Forward
→ ~30–45 million deaths from famine
→ One of the worst human-made disasters in history
Cultural Revolution
→ Education destroyed
→ Scientific class purged
→ Economy stalled for a decade
By 1976 (Mao’s death):
China’s per-capita income was similar to or lower than India’s
Rural poverty was universal
Industry was inefficient and isolated
If Mao had continued governing unchallenged, China would still be poor.
The uncomfortable truth most narratives dodge
China’s escape from poverty happened after Mao, not because of him.
It was driven by:
Market reforms
Foreign trade
Incentives
Abandonment of Maoist economics
That pivot begins under Deng Xiaoping, who explicitly rejected Mao’s economic line while keeping Mao as a symbol.
Deng’s implicit message:
Mao saved the state. Mao nearly ruined the economy."
And Yes, the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany after 20 million killed but it was Stalin who made the disastrous "non-agrression pact" with the Nazis and was unprepared when they invaded. After Khruschev denounced Stalin for perverting socialism and betraying the revolution, Mao defended his use of terror: " Khrushchev condemned terror as betrayal of socialism.
George Orwell was a rat for the OSS and sold out a bunch of his comrades, also called Paul Robeson “very anti-white.” The British caused famines that murdered millions of Indians during the same time as famines ravaged China.
Mao also raised life expectancy by almost 40 years during his leadership. And China has developed into the most responsible global power on the planet under communist leadership. Many of the crimes against Stalin were made up, the Big Black Book of Communism that alleges his body count exceeds that of Hitler has been thoroughly discredited. They counted Nazis killed during WW2 against him.
Of course, both these men committed atrocities, as all world leaders do. They got a lot of shit wrong, but they were ruling nations during a postwar period where the entirety of the world lived under authoritarian conditions cause they just had two global wars during a 30 year period. Comparing them to the likes of people like Hitler, or even white supremacist Churchill, is mostly the product of western propaganda. The west formed NATO post war, immediately attacked the Soviets who were their allies, and then spent the next several decades building neo-imperialism and capturing now some 75% of the world’s resources. They’ve also committed countless genocides since then, in Korea, Vietnam, Palestine, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, etc.
Doesn’t mean we can’t rightfully criticize what the communist leaders did get wrong and when they did overstep their bounds and have people murdered, but their societies also improved the lives of multiple millions of people. The Soviet Union went from a peasant serf nation living under autocracy to a global superpower with great education, healthcare and housing during Stalin’s rule. China ended foot binding and made divorce legal, liberating millions of women from abusive marriages.
I’d suggest reading Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti. Cause the most fuming commies were right about Stalin and Mao too.
"Fascism was the application to white people of colonial procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'coolies' of India, and the 'ni**ers' of Mrica."
-Aimé Fernand David Césaire
***
Simply speaking, Fascism is Imperialism brought home..
"With unfailing consistency, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests."
It's often forgotten that Stalin had to deal with Trotsky and the like who were installed by the ancestors of the modern banking "elite", and most of the "communist" atrocities attributed to Stalin actually took place during their rule (the ritual murder of Russian poet Sergey Yesenin comes to mind). Stalin was no saint either, but it can be argued that the main reason he was demonized was because he kicked out the bankers' cartel puppets (similar to Putin) and changed the course of WWII. Ironically, the first country to recognize the communist revolution in 1917 was USA.
I don’t know that Stalin was a psychopath. He was certainly driven paranoid by all the constant western intervention in his society and their funding counterrevolutionary and fascist forces and spreading propaganda everywhere. I think he was under more pressure than maybe any world leader in history, and made a lot of mistakes because of that and didn’t have good solutions. Considering what we now know about the Epstein files and how the vast majority of people executed by the Soviet govt were fascists and capitalists, like there weren’t good solutions for how to deal with all of that. Basically, gulags or death. You can’t put pedophiles and sadist torturers in general society. Also, Stalin was one man in a country of hundreds of millions, there was a vast body of local and state officials also involved in all of that. It was maybe the most difficult time any country has ever had, recovering from losing 27 million people while rebuilding and industrializing. Most leaders would not have held that nation together.
Oh yeah, and when the Soviet Union fell, the people the west put in charge put child slavery rings into practice, something communists had somehow been holding back. Because yeah, if you’re fighting capitalists who have rape and murder parties on secret islands with everyone else’s kids, like yeah, you might need to use some authoritarian measures to protect people. None of what happens in the world happens in a vacuum. Trump is a psychopath. Stalin is a man who lived through several mass trauma events and was obviously affected deeply by it. He also tried to resign multiple times and they wouldn’t let him. He wasn’t a power hungry monster. He was the first brown leader of a European power on a continent run by white supremacists who were scared communists would dismantle their power and make them stop killing people for profits.
"the vast majority of people executed by the Soviet govt were fascists and capitalists,"
Tens of millions of people were "fascists and capitalists" who deserved *death*?
"... [T]here weren’t good solutions for how to deal with all of that. Basically, gulags or death."
"Trump is a psychopath. [In contrast..] Stalin is a man who lived through several mass trauma events and was obviously affected deeply by it." !!!
"He [Stalin?] wasn’t a power hungry monster. He was the first brown leader of a European power on a continent run by white supremacists" !!!!
Poor Stalin! /s The best way I can think to respond to this breathtaking rationalization of Stalin's manifest psychopathy is the well-known Nietzsche quote, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."
Is this what is going on in so-called "Leftist" minds today? Holy cow! No wonder the US is going mad and on the verge of civil war! And goodness knows I have no love for Trump, capitalism, or Rightism...
----------
"You can’t put pedophiles and sadist torturers in general society."
Side note: Paranoia, pedophilia, sadism, and psychopathy are all different conditions, and can occur in any combination.
Funny that you quote the favorite philosopher of Nazis to make that very anticommunist point. Stalin didn’t murder tens of millions of people. There are no historical sources that corroborate that number. He did defeat the Nazis though. Nothing in there is rationalization. It’s historical analysis that accurately understands what the global and national conditions were then and now. The problem isn’t psychopathy. It’s capitalism.
Stalin improved the lives of millions of people and oversaw the fastest growing economy on the history of the planet. He was adored by millions upon millions of poor brown people and scholars alike, like WEB DuBois who wrote a eulogy to him calling him a Black Legend. Yes, he also made some brutal errors. And abused his power. But I promise you, if you read the historical narrative from global south and socialist perspectives and find the accurate accounting of that particular time in human history, you find a truly different portrait of the man. Sure, you can continue to believe the one taught to you by the same people that tell you alive breeding child rapists like Thomas Jefferson were bad men with good ideas. But read Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds, or Domemic Losurdo’s Stalin: A History and Critique of a Black Legend. The latter is free from Iskra Books.
The same people who taught you Stalin was a monster are the people who taught you Christopher Columbus was a hero. Why were they so afraid of him? Maybe because his methods were effective at stopping psychopaths.
All important points and facts, Mr. Hilbig. I wonder why it is that even intelligent people who've read independent historians like Parenti and are aware of the many atrocities of imperialist capitalists remain anti-Stalin, anti-communist? It demonstrates to me how insidious the capitalists' psyop is, perpetrated through their CIA goons. Read Gabriel Rockhill's book: "Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?" where he discusses the CIA's program--the Congress of Cultural Freedom--which propagandized many Western intellectuals.
You've certainly got a bizarre understanding of what psychopaths are. I'd re-read the definition, and consider diagnosing your acceptance of all the killings in the name of economics and politics, no matter what the number.
"Stalin improved the lives of millions of people and oversaw the fastest growing economy on the history of the planet."
Bullshit. The country went down the tubes from then on, in perpetual grinding misery until it finally imploded. More importantly for Marxism, he was the first to really give it a bad name. Even an outreach guy like Gorbachev couldn't rescue what had finally become of it by the 1980s, the people were so demoralized. Once Gorby pulled the cork, the outrage was unstoppable. (I was watching it all in real time, were you?) And then in the '90s, and at least on this you and I certainly must agree, the Western vultures came in. But more than that, it was *native* psychopaths who became the kleptocrat oligarchs.
Rapid industrialization (steel, coal, heavy industry).
Mass electrification.
Expansion of literacy and technical education.
Urbanization and scientific development.
USSR emerged as a superpower after WWII.
Many peasants did move into industrial jobs; some experienced upward mobility.
But omitted costs
Forced collectivization → mass famine (notably the Holodomor and wider Soviet famine of 1932–33).
Gulag forced labor system.
Political purges and executions.
Mass deportations of ethnic groups." And I would add a catastrophic deal to divide Poland with Hitler than led to the German invasion and 25 million dead Soviet citizens. And as for economic growth; it was at a great cost and other nation have done far better without the mass slaughter and brutality: Other economies (postwar Japan, South Korea, China under Deng) matched or exceeded sustained growth with far less mortality.
DeBois? "Du Bois’s praise reflected his political alignment and Cold War context.
He did not have access to later archival evidence on purges/famines.
Many scholars view his eulogy as ideological rather than historical assessment." Many left thinkers did break after Khrushchev’s speech:
Party members in Europe resigned.
Western communists split into reform vs orthodox camps.
Some Marxist scholars re-evaluated Stalin sharply.
Du Bois was not part of that wave of repudiation." I would bid you reread 1984 and Animal Farm for a different view of Stalin.
"the vast majority of people executed by the Soviet govt were fascists and capitalists,"
Tens of millions of people were "fascists and capitalists" who deserved *death*?
"... [T]here weren’t good solutions for how to deal with all of that. Basically, gulags or death."
"Trump is a psychopath. [In contrast..] Stalin is a man who lived through several mass trauma events and was obviously affected deeply by it." !!!
"He [Stalin?] wasn’t a power hungry monster. He was the first brown leader of a European power on a continent run by white supremacists" !!!!
Poor Stalin! /s The best way I can think to respond to this breathtaking rationalization of Stalin's manifest psychopathy is the well-known Nietzsche quote, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."
Is this what is going on in so-called "Leftist" minds today" Here's a clue: leftists want to get rid of Trump and Maga fascist brutality, universal healthcare, the end of big money in politics, green energy, shared prosperity, the rights of labor, the end of support for Israel, and the replacement of oligarchy with a democratic republic. Don't tell us malice what we stand for: ask us and watch how we vote and march.
No. I vote for the lesser evil, given no other choice. I assume you either vote for the greater evil or a 3d party (as I did with Nader and Stein, which gave us Bush and Trump) or which helps the greater evil, or did nothing, in smug superiority: "All that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing." I view Clinton as a corrupt leader who moved Democrats to the right and Obama a great disappointment. You can try to push me into a mold you can then despise, but you are wrong on all counts. Who did you vote for?
You are three years older than me and I have concluded that our societies must be a mixture of ideologies as none are complete in themselves. Capitalism has ruined the West, liberalism is dead, and socialism has to be resurrected and conservatives are a fraud having sold their souls to capitalism and its forever wars. Neoliberalism has done horrendous damage to democracy and our values. I have no party affiliation and vote strategically for the best person or lesser evil. Elections are no more than dog and pony shows.
Yes, hybrids are the most successful, using what works best. Elections are one of the many means available......along with protests, strikes, etc. Even Marx though that communism might be achieved without bloodshed thru democratic means.
We seem to be coming from the same space. I do wonder if it's possible to make change in the u..s without it all being destroyed system wise. We just didn't make the transition to Socialism in time, early 70s maybe while unions still had some power.
People are starting to learn the power of their labor through General Strikes I see around the world. We are all Palestinian now.
All I really know about the rise of communism in China and Russia is what I learned living in a capitalist society. Still, given the arts and literature, music and theatre produced in Russia both pre and post revolution, calling it a feudal backwater seems completely wrong.
What I do know, from my lived experience, is that Western powers spent rivers of blood to prevent countries who embraced communism from succeeding, and made all out war against their own labor classes to destroy any whiff of collectivism.
Yeah, I've had to totally re-evaluate all the "history" I was taught. Most of it was propaganda, and where there is complexity I also have to deal with the deep cognitive programming of The Judge, that as an American it is my role to armchair judge the deep struggles of other societies, especially while my own society is totally messed up and not even trying to do better. Time to let that chauvinism and arrogance go too.
Communism didn’t overthrow advanced capitalism in either place.
It replaced failed paths to modernization.
That’s why Mao and Stalin look less like Marx’s heirs and more like brutal state-builders trying to do in decades what Europe took centuries to do." The point of my rhetoric was to contrast with the requirements for communism that Marx articulate, as possible only in highly industrialized, mature capitalist nations with concentrations of wealth and a robust bourgoisie, which both China and Russia lacked, being poor mostly agrarian nations.
Dale, respectfully, how do you know what you think you know about Russia or China? At the time of the Russian revolution, only a few states had begun industrialization. At the time of the rise of communism in China, many nations were still agrarian.
And I don’t know what you mean by ‘weak capitalism,’ as capitalism is currently destroying the people of this planet.
What marked the revolutions in China, Russia, and France was a vast level of income inequality. Kind of what we have now. Sadly for the kings and emperors of France, China, and Russia, they didn’t have Peter Thiel and the ability to spy on all the people all of the time.
Hell, the Renaissance was, for the average frustrated european peasant, far worse materially than the High Middle Ages, but the Renaissance certainly produced its share of arts, literature and music.
China was wrong? China had ended poverty in 2021...meaning that 800+ million people now live a decent life. Democracy? There is too much to say about that...May I suggest reading Pino Arlacchi's "China explained to the West", for a start? He us a illustrissimo scholar, not a journalist
Imagine you just founded a new nation out of a revolution which got renamed a "civil war" after you succeeded in taking hold of the government, and many foreign nations chipped in to help the minority continue the take down this new government. Imagine that it still didn't end the opposition when the "civil war" formally ended. Imagine it this way. Imagine the USA had 100s of 1000s of people doing what Timothy McVeigh was accused of doing running around your country, some organized externally, sabotage in the mines and factories... What solutions do you have? You say you're a Marxist: what does this problem/resolution look like when you apply dialectical historical materialism?
Keep following Caitlin's advise, you'll get past those obstacles. I recommend reading "Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism" by Gabriel Rockhill. And take this comment by Caitlin more to heart "you live under a capitalist power structure which aggressively indoctrinates its populace from birth into believing that communism is No No Bad Bad" It runs deeper than we think until we've done the work that this article is all about.
Communism in its truest format would benefit everyone but the extremely wealthy, So they could not allow it to happen. I'm reading about that in a book based around WWI and how America got UK, France and some others to, secretly, send soldiers to stop the Bolsheviks startinga Soviet Russian Republic, first time in my 85 years, 86 in April (so ahead of you,Dale) that I understood what soviet meant, I'm ashamed to admit. Way back in my twenties, I used to wonder why we didn't have that system, now I think because everything Russia had to be bad, not that that has changed even today.
It is important to both criticize and praise our governmental systems and the countries that run with them.
China under Deng Xiaoping and others raised millions out of poverty and built the second largest economy. China has build good train infrastructure. However, we must not forget the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and human rights abuses in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang.
The United States has the Bill of Rights protecting free speech. Patent laws and business acumen saw the rise of the devices we are using to post here and the infrastructure undergirding it. However, the US Empire has consistently for 100 years invaded and bullied nations across the world from Iran (1953 overthrow of the government) to Venezuela.
Without capitalism and democracy I would not have a life way more comfortable than my ancestors. Without Chinese labour I would not have this smartphone.
Personally, I tend to veer more towards anarchism and libertarianism. Billionaires, big corporations and big governments are not to be trusted.
maybe, you would've been an spd-member in germany (1918 - 1933). (also maybe we should adopt some a.a.-formalities before commenting, like: 'hi, i'm martin and my pov's are the result of a lifetime under very anti-communist capitalist rule').
the peasants of russia and china tried and were far more successfull than anything that emerged from the industrialized west. the best way to criticize them is doing socialism/communism better. the western wannabe communists had plenty of time, but the ruling class seemed smarter up to the point that they don't have to pay anyone to criticize comrades all over the world.
"I suggest avoiding blanket generalizations and defining terms. I suggest not taking sides. In doing so we betray the truth"
That's *precisely* why I respect democracy as the way to run a government, not ideology. Marxism is NOT about democracy, it is a stealth religion parading as democracy.
I believe hybrid capitalist-socialist systems, (truly) democratically run, forever tweaked, are the way to go. Two hundred plus years of history of actual implementations of all kinds of systems has taught us at least that.
Having read Simon Sebag Montefiore's books about Stalin, I don't think Stalin's cruelty and crimes were because of communism, but because of flaws in his own personality. Stalin had a rotten upbringing with an abusive mother. History might have turned out very differently if not for that. He was extremely intelligent, but had strong streaks of antisocial personality disorders.
One day someone will make the same excuses for Trump. Not everyone with neglectful or abusive parents ends up behaving like a psychopath. We all have choices.
It is as though any leader of the dominant party in revolutionary Russia claiming a Soviet Union of larger land mass than any nation state for centuries preceding it and languages and values systems that when merged under an alien ideology so ripe for feudal monarchical corruption and nepotism any such leader of such a wide variety of cultures that could arise could protect themselves while rebuilding systems the Soviets had thoroughly and ideologically trashed as regressive! Not to mention most of the land mass being at arctic latitudes!
Careful examination of such multi-cultural consolidation into our modern concept of procedural liberal or neo-liberal societies in hostile climates will find few well-adjusted leaders attaining a critical mass of supporters to keep such an international venture from eating itself or being sectioned off from more stable royal orders or heavenly disciples of absolute 'psychopathic' if revolutionary\predatory leaders that manage the trick of Cult of Personality.
Much more study is needed of the role of industrial scale advertising and Public Relations in stabilizing such forcibly and militarily consolidated lands, peoples and tongues at a finer level of attention and study than the U.S. school systems have ever attempted.
That will be required to understand the transition of the vast British Empire into the English language dominant yet relatively stable system of internal and institutional checks & balances that allowed for both the personal freedoms (except for those of inferior gender, skin color, tribal tongue and systems of math, navigation, social and environmental balance in maintenance of settled lands) and institutional cohesion necessary to attain our own highly wealth and opportunity stratified far from perfect national project. Replete with Predatory Economics as were practiced by the British Monarchs.
We also have some more benign 'head cases' who have risen through the ranks of our filtered systems of electoral majorities into ranks that nearly matched those of absolute power and privilege seen by our own chain of colonial rule. Mass media as we all have experienced is no guarantor or safe-guard of the "Public Interest" where auto-pillage is the only setting that has ever ruled over our auctioned off most powerful means of mass communication as was developed in the past centuries of the spread of the old Anglo Social orders into a New World of intercontinental Private Wealth holdings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aK4OztueuE&t=586s
"From an Economics without Capitalism to Markets without Capitalism | DiEM25"
Yanis Varoufakis
"697,413 views Jan 26, 2021"
A lecture organised by University of Tübingen economics students, delivered on Monday February 3, 2020, on the theme "From an Economics without Capitalism to Markets without Capitalism". With lively lecture hall Q&A in English despite this being a German University!
"Mainstream economic models lack some important features of really-existing capitalism, including money, time and space. Its models offer ideological cover for a capitalist system that has usurped competitive, free markets."
"The result? Unbearable inequality, climate catastrophe and permanent stagnation. A fork on the road is approaching: It will take us either into deeper stagnation and environmental degradation or to a society with markets but no capitalism. Prof. Yanis Varoufakis talks about the future of our economy and the current state of economics with special regard to pluralism in economics."
We haven't even begun following the money from Swiss banks and Caribbean Islands High Finance Electronic HQ store-houses of raw wealth and portable accounting. Or of the Military Industrial Complex infrastructure and early stages of that international order of 'development' and Global Trade. Bring your most reliable erase-able writing implements and recording devices. Rough weather and the paradoxes of any genuine search for truths that can hold water and remain afloat and then construct healthful and affordable infrastructure without Top Down Psychopathology Transference may be expected.
"[T]here is only one party worth joining, and that is the party of truth."
You talk about humility, yet you do not acknowledge that there is no such thing as (accessible) truth. ALL is perception, thought, communication, that is, human-centric things -- and thus ALL is eternally subject to reconsideration and revision.
It's in the very nature of human beings, who are universally and eternally limited and imperfect. All of this differs from person to person, and society to society. Accordingly, there never can or will be any static, complete Grand Unified Theory -- of anything.
Thank you for a disclosure we are sorely lacking in all of our Thought Control-devised and advertiser-sponsored broadcasting and even wireless communications Systems of Mass Distraction here in the 'developed and capitalized world.'
It's clear to me that Marxists (and libertarians, for that matter) simply cannot see the forest for the trees.
The biggest problem with human collectives of any ideological stripe is our inability to control psychopathy. That is, to successfully identify and contain people who do NOT care about other people, from those who do, and those in between for whatever reasons.
Until that happens, it does not matter if Marx was correct about anything economic, positively or normatively. Until that happens, we will continue to see the very parade of antidemocratic monsters acting *in Marx's name* -- the ones you openly acknowledge! -- destroying societies with far more tears than capitalism every produced.
Get real, or we'll just keep repeating a hell, no matter what it is, or what it is called.
It helps when you don't have a system that selects for psychopathy, which capitalism does. It incentives people who will ruthlessly advance the demands of private capital.
If you think Marxists have caused far more tears, you've been living in a bubble.
Look, there is no system that "selects" for psychopathy, consciously or not.
The objective of an intelligent psychopath is to learn the system they swim in, and game it, as far they can up the ladder. It's a variant of the iron law of oligarchy, and a consequence of the (actual) range of human nature. Thus this happens in EVERY system. And it will keep happening until a system is *consciously* designed to control it, before the fact.
If you think any of the systems that have called themselves Marxist have escaped this, you're certainly deluded.
Capitalism literally selects for psychopaths, it requires people who are willing and able to serve the narrow and anti-social interest of capital (a ruthless abstraction with no moral obligation) over human beings. Militarism often does a similar thing, promoting the most effective killers. The two make good friends.
Whatever you want to say about power, corruption, etc etc inherent in all systems, you have to acknowledge that the very least one can hope for is a system that isn't looking to actively promote people with no conscience or empathy and strong ambition because they embody the values of the system and keep it running. That is what we have.
"Modern governments literally select for psychopaths, as they require people who are willing and able to serve the narrow and anti-social of power over human beings."
FIFY
How you're able to institute a Marxist system that -- for the first time in history, for ANY system, Marxist or not, over a large population -- is able to bypass the psychopaths is beyond me.
Power is going to exist, and corruption is always a danger. Should it be organized around serving the needs of the people, or the accumulation of an abstract thing that doesn't care about people? That's all this is, the shape of the incentive structure, not whether power exists or not, or if it can or is abused. Better to have an incentive structure that isn't inherently poisonous as a start, your odds of sick people is lower.
Been a commie most of my life. It’s a tough journey at times but the tools of analysis that bring broad theory and practical everyday knowledge to life are very useful. Like any science doubt is a valuable friend. ✊🏼
"A thoughtful atheist, living in good conscience, himself does not understand how close he is to God. This is because he performs good deeds with no thought of reward, in contrast to religious hypocrites."
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
Except you don't need imaginary friends to realize this.
For me, the worst part about religion is that it "monopolizes" the Good (no pun intended), claiming that only religious man can be a good and moral man..
Caitlin, you are one brave lady. My thoughts exactly. For more good analysis see Prof. Richard Wolff, Marxist economist at R.D. Wolff.com and Democracy at Work.info.
Political maturity has to do with the fact the West only constitutes 12 % of the world population. The dominance we have held economically and militarily is gone and Western ruling classes are terrified of the fact they are going to be in a minority position. It is time to quit fighting wars and accept the fact we have to partner with the rest of the world. The age of empires is over and we have to adopt whole new strategies. We have to see the world as it is not through eyes of BS propagandists and half-baked demagogues who refuse accept that we must live in a state of constant progressive adaptation. How we govern ourselves is more important than ever. Political systems have to be purged of corruption and incompetence.
Wonder why the pillar of Capitalism, USA, is trying to prevent the competition at global scale at all costs (incl. WW3), Clinging to its global hegemony by all means?
The problem is figuring out how to organise your society in such a way as to prevent the accumulation of excessive power in individuals, cliques and social classes. Marxism has provided useful theoretical and practical frameworks, but this fundamental problem has not been solved. Humans evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in small groups—nomadic hunter-gatherers. When we shifted to sedentary agricultural societies, the exploitation started. So keeping the scale small as much as possible is one of the keys, imho. But we still need to solve the issue of large-scale projects and how to prevent them from being hijacked by psychopaths.
A larger society has a survival advantage in the competition with other societies for resources.
A society cannot easily grow larger than Dunbar's Number without also adopting some form of money, politics, and government (so anarchism is sterile). This is why the smaller scale works better.
But we defined money to represent debt and added interest, and that definition promotes and enables society to try to break Laws of Nature that can't BE broken, so society breaks everything else instead. It grows like a Cancer, uncontrolled, until it kills its host. Those definitions create and increase inequality. They underpin Capitalism. They give advantages to psychopaths.
If the definitions (of ownership and money) are fixed, we can do it. Marx understood the problems better than most, but sought to eliminate ownership rather than just its profits.
well, industrialization, highly organised labor and technological advances seemed miraculously promising. looking back it might look like having your cake and eating it.
As long as there was a surplus of environment available to exploit, it was a winning strategy. A wrong and immoral strategy, but it made the GDP grow fast, and that is what won wars.
As soon as we perceived the limitations, we knew we had to stop, but the owning class (the psychopaths) had already been put in power. They must be removed, or starved, just as any cancer must be removed, for the patient to survive.
I support this. Their structural critique has always been correct, which is probably why it’s so taboo, while facile and useless liberalism, constantly try to soften and accommodate around the edges of the status quo, is a constant letdown. And the desperate cope of "free market" fundamentalists who think they can save capitalism by letting it run wild is so frustratingly sad.
There are particular communists, and brands of communism that I really dislike. Especially those that don’t like art and music, what they see as bourgeoisie vices, and think human liberation is a one-size fits all of everyone miserable slaving out in the fields. Or those who think that inner experience, spirituality, and consciousness are empty diversions from material struggle.
But the thing that I like is that none of those identity-larping guys can own the core issue of removing control of society from private capital and a capitalist class, and giving it to regular human beings and their priorities. It’s obvious that this is the only way humanity survives. Unless we can fully take power back, our system is like a fast car with no brakes on a winding mountain road.
We can choose our values for a post-capitalist future, that need not be austere and harsh, but humane, creative, and empowering people to be the best version of themselves and do what the things they were meant to do. In fact, as capitalism hits the inevitable contraction phase, the only way to preserve freedom, quality of life, and human potential is to de-throne capital.
"Political Maturity Is Realizing The Commies Were Correct".
Bravo! Caitlin & Tim, you are brilliant! The best you have written. The world needs communism as never before. Did the average person stop to think ever why it was the communists who were slaughtered every time the empires old and new went on a rampage.
Growing up I imbibed communism listening wide-eyed to my big brother ( already noted as a public intellectual) and his likeminded friends. I wouldn't say I was brainwashed but they opened my eyes.
As my favourite anarchist, Emma Goldman, said, communism is a step in the right direction, but it isn't the whole answer. Try reading some Enrico Malatesta, George Woodcock, Proudon, Kropotkin, Paul Goodman. Anarchy is not chaos as those who dictate what is "right" to us would have us believe. Anarchy reverses the pyramid so that we, the people are at the top and the shitcans are at the bottom.
I don't think it can be more. It fills a radical niche in Western societies precisely because it is inert and doesn't threaten the system. I've seen so much totally ineffective activism in the US and Pacific Northwest based around anarchist ideology. Was down at the Occupy encampments. Nothing was accomplished.
The logic should be clear: To challenge organized power, you need organized power. Leaderless ad hoc collections of individuals doing whatever they want does not challenge power.
Anarchism isn’t necessarily leaderless. That’s kind of a myth. In fact, I think your view of anarchism is based mostly on mythologies. We have seen glimpses of how anarchism works when we look at the caucus system; anarchism well done would be the type of democracy we can only dream of.
I don’t think anarchism is about not having leaders at all. It is ensuring there isn’t centralization of power. There’s enough rotation of it. Because any level of organization of power needs intact for too long is too much decisional autonomy in a single hands or a few hands — which really isn’t a betterment in the condition of political freedom, even though it might better the material conditions.
Unfortunately leaders can be eliminated which causes whatever movement the leaders were leading to fall apart. JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X immediately come to mind. As well as the many lesser known leaders who were murdered by TPTB from Walter Reuther to Patrice Lumumbu to Fred Hampton to Dag Hammerskold and on and on.
Anyone who gains any traction as a threat to the system gets whacked. If we could be like ants or bees and be able to do what needs doing without being led (the queen doesn’t lead, she just lays eggs and when she starts lagging the workers kill her and create a new queen) we’d have a chance.
Unfortunately humans don’t operate that way. I really don’t see a way out.
I don't think you really understand anarchism. It is not leaderless and it is not un-organized. In fact, an anarchic group has to be super organized. Of course, like with anything, there are probably less organized anarchists, but that is not what anarchism is about at all.
Look up Mondragon in Spain, successful for 80 years. the libertarian socialist movement of consumer and worker’s coops, which is independent of the state and democratically anarchist, have one billion members.
Anarchism might be the essence of communism, but how do you suddenly dissolve the state and the Epstein lovingly class hands over its property for building socialism? So sorry, thats nice, but we need to appreciate the realism of the concept of " the dictatorship of the proletariat " where the Epstein class is forcibly removed from power and expropriated, as it most likely will have to be. To think that something like a liberation army can be replaced by idealist anarchist philosophy, for all its value, the conditions for realising any compassionate philosophy or social welfare state has historically had to be, and will have to be, wrested from the dripping claws of the beast of property. As Caitlin suggests, the understanding and exposure of capitalism and its Epstein classes was most clearly and extensively laid out by the herculean labors of Karl Marx who, like Leonard Finkelstein and Franscesca Albanese, called out the servants of the beast in his day, and intuited the possibilities of a future state of real freedom from the wage slavery and financial fraud of the Beast and its billionaire and wannabe billionaire devotees. They are the dead end of the capitalist era trying to violently preserve the illusion of being the way to the future while they sense they are really more like garbage in the way. The best tool for growth of insight and class war remains the traditions founded on Marx and tested under intense capitalist fire in the soviet union which, in spite of all the mercenary armies thrown at it by the Epstein cabals of the day grew by socialist planning to be the frontrunner in the space race and the second most powerful bloc in the world. This is not even to mention what China has achieved with its huge communist party, in spite of all the mistakes and misrepresentations shoved down the public throat by the politicians of the beast when they take a break from raping underage girls, while prioritizing the urgent liberalisation of the age of consent to reflect misogynist partriarchal practises. So we need to achieve anarchism through the scaffolding of the democratic workers state, however that comes to be conceived in terms of the current situation and conditions. Some causes really are worth living and dying for. Imagine what an international legion of well armed and trained communists could have done to prevent Netanyahus orgy of matricide, infanticide and genocide in Palestine?
So i read Marx and the Marxists with love and gratitude, not for the form but the content, which is true human liberation from the false and vicious consciousness of the bourgeoisie by which it continues to be held captive.
May we meet one day in the enlightened anarchy of fulfilled human beings in the global commune where socialism has made the state a history as ancient as the unexpected and violent slaughter, in the early twenty first century, of the entire Epstein class of oligarchs, by forces largely unknown, and its farcical figurehead, intended as an insult to the working class, occupying the highest office of the country, whose body parts had to be pressure hosed from every nook and cranny of the oval office.
Anarchism is about reversing the pyramid, putting people in power leaving those who presently control everything at the bottom. If it were possible, people would have to become very organized and discuss how to defend themselves. Anarchists that I have met certainly do not underestimate the ruling class. I don't know where you get your information, but some reading might help. Enrico Malatesta, Kropotkin, George Woodcock has a book of essays, so does Paul Goodman.
i occasionally read things on https://www.marxists.org/english.htm. i did some malatesta and kropotkin there. there also seems to be some info on declassified cia-files where anarchists and anarchism are viewed as 'the compatible left'. their opposition to and criticism of any 'state', would make them useful especially as a leftist take down of any existing alternative outside empire (seems to be true today: anarchist critique of venezuela, cuba, china, north-korea, ...). 'unorganised' anarchist were sometimes used to disrupt communist organisation.
re: underestimating empire (and some communist /anarchist beef) -> spain 1936-1939.
Well, whaddaya know? An endorsement from Caitlin Johnstone! I'll take it! Thank you very much!
Seriously, it took me a long time to admit those annoying commies who seemed to actively enjoy giving me cognitive dissonance were right about how capitalism works and how it treats people as commodities, without which you can't have colonialism. No colonialism, no Israel...
That's why communists and anarchists alike are not surprised that Epstein could happen.
"No colonialism, no Israel." No UK, no EU either, no US of A nor all the Western colonial nor Corporate-Captured holdings like Canada and those claimed by other Euro prettied up Social Democratic Utopias. Mind you I've become persuaded of Social Democratic values in theory and in rejecting our U.S. Colonial 2 Sides of Royal to Wall Street minted Paper Currency & CoinAge (Pennies have now been priced out of our colonial continuance system. More devaluation and dissolution of Public Interest to follow...)
However, my access to weapons of Mass Destruction are rather limited and our failing 'electoral' empire's methods of persuasion maintain true financial rule from Wall Street and the Lords of Documented Wealth and Military Enforcement.
I don't see much accounting of True Costs except for a few non-broadcast-able first-rate thinkers such as these willing to confront the internal contradictions and paradoxes of theoretical and doomed to failure E-CON models:
The Iroquois Confederacy was an indigenous alliance which was certainly influenced by the colonists, but it was definitely an indigenous organization which in fact influenced the United States Constitution.
No, I would not consider the Iroquois Confederacy as a historical colonial entity. Quite the reverse. It was an indigenous political entity strong enough to resist colonial domination for at least a century.
The Mohawk and others within the regionally expanding Iroquois Confederacy engaged in genocidal campaigns v. other tribes. See the Creek Confederacy and relocation of Iroquois Confederacy southeastern tribes within the Confederacy.
The root of the adjective or Pronoun "Colonial" is shared by the verb to "Colonize."
Every Indigenous presence in what came to be called Turtle Island or North America or any human settled colony colonized their home land and defended that turf from other colonizers. Tribal, national or regional. Which came first conquest, exile or settling the Home Land?
I intend these to be unsettling questions of inquiry shared into how we conceive language and maintain a sense of time (a human concept and\or limitation physically settled if not faithfully or uniformly accepted and\or resolved among our species). I do not intend this disquisition as a challenge to any superior's sense of order or mutually, much less universally acceptable human arrangement.
the most social democratic nation is NOrway: their wealth is built on offshore oil, not exploiting people. They are using the wealth from the oil to build a society that will be prosperous, free, and happy when the oil runs out. Between state capitalism and private capitalism is the 3d way of democratic socialism, which takes the best of both systeems in a hybrid that has created in Northern Europe the most prosperous, free, and happy people on earth.
We do not have "free markets." Read Robert Reich....astute understanding of the wealth/poverty divide. Poverty is A POLICY CHOICE. The system is RIGGED. It has always been rigged. Wish you were here, George Carlin, RIP...
"Capitalism" is not the same thing as "free markets". Capitalism is Rockefeller economics, where corporations and politicians work together to monopolize and destroy competition ("crony capitalism" or "corporatism"). Communism is Satan's apostate and evil version of the Law of Consecration, where agency is removed. Conflating "capitalism" with "free markets" is a slight of hand to justify communism. The "fascism" of the right, and the "communism" of the left is the greatest trick of all, where both outcomes lead to the same thing - total government control and the total removal of economic agency. #two-partyillusion
Free markets are not a real thing. They've never existed, and never will, because they posit an economic playing field that isn't shaped by money or power!
Those born to wealth will not voluntarily accept risk. Hence, Military Industrial E-CON-O-mies. Risk of one's family wealth in so-called Free Markets are not acceptable to those Born to the Breed. Wall Street investor miracle tales have much of the risk removed or not wagered or even government-controlled by the down-wardly mobile Public Servants who were born on 3rd Base (as we Yanks say in our quaint Brit-adapted game of colonial baseball..)
Here is how "Systemic Correction" is handled in U.S. serial High Finance Collapse Bail Outs of my well spent mostly 20th Century yoot and now 21st Century Wage Stag Nation slavery. Keep a pen and notebook handy to imprint upon you. Electronic devices don't imprint neurologically like hand-writing your own notes and periodically consulting and up-dating...This documentary is appropriately titled: INSIDE JOB as no U.S. Regulatory System has come close to correcting these remarkably punctual Public Interest Bail Outs of Hoarded Private Capital:
"Inside Job is a 2010 American documentary film, directed by Charles Ferguson, about the late 2000s financial crisis.
"The global financial meltdown that took place in Fall of 2008 caused millions of job and home losses and plunged the United States into a deep economic recession.
"This documentary provides a detailed examination of the elements that led to the collapse and identifies key financial and political players.
"Director Charles Ferguson conducts a wide range of interviews and traces the story from the United States to China to Iceland to several other global financial hot spots.
"Ferguson, who began researching in 2008, says the film is about "the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption". In five parts, the film explores how changes in the policy, environment and banking practices helped create the financial crisis."
Via
Tio Mitchito
Mitch Ritter\11 year highly commended Executive Office Case Worker for Wells Fargo Card Services Written and Filed Complaints audited by the flaccid U.S. Regulatory so-called Consumer Protection Agencies the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and U.S. (White Collar) Justice System.
There is such a thing as hybrids...it's a continuum, not necessarily the stark extremes at either end. Richard Wolff explains that China has a hybrid ECONOMIC system...private and public ownership. The political system is authoritarian - like ours IS NOW. I continually hear people conflating the two....economic and political.
From your previous comment, it seems you were stating that the American political system is authoritarian, just like China's. Is that assumption wrong?
Wonder why the pillar of Capitalism, USA, is trying to prevent the competition at global scale at all costs (incl. WW3), Clinging to its global hegemony by all means?
***
"Competition is a sin"
- J.D. Rockefeller
***
"Vertical" and "Horizontal" Integration by J.D. Rockefeller:
If you follow the line of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, are you a socialist or a communist or both? For that matter, if you are a Marxist, same question. I am still not clear on this even after studying some Marx/Engels/Lenin/Trotsky and reading hundreds of contemporary articles.
Anyway -- of course Marx was totally right. The more you observe, the more clear it is. What is really striking is the tremendous effectiveness of capitalist indoctrination. I know plenty of people who are educated and intelligent, and still believe the shit they read in the New York Times.
People have said to me they don't care for the World Socialist Webste (https://wsws.org) because it's too "ideological". Didn't Marx say the predominant ideology is the ruling class ideology? The NY Times is drenched in capitalist ideology, but these well-educated people never notice that.
I have been a steadfast supporter since 2012. I remember walking into an public SEP meeting for the first time, in New York City, and immediately being deeply impressed. Though still relatively naïve (relative to myself today), I knew I was in a room with people whose political clarity and understanding was way beyond anything I'd ever encountered. Which is another way of restating Caitlin's point: we commies are right.
Here's the argument. Name me one example of socialism that has worked in practice. Actual socialism, meaning the collective ownership of the means of production.
Very well. We'll start with your first assertion -- that you "matched [my] tone. Nothing else." That's demonstrably false. See above. I said your comment bespoke profound ignorance. To suggest someone is ignorant may be unflattering, but "ignorant" is objective and nonjudgmental rather than abusive. I, for example, am utterly ignorant about electrical engineering. To say "David is ignorant of electrical engoineering" would not be an insult. You, by contrast, stated above that those who are intelligent agree with your view of socialism and those who do not are "morons." Do you understand the difference?
Now you ask -- rhetorically, perhaps -- if I can cite an example of socialism that has "worked," with collective ownership of the means of production. I would say: no, not yet, but the fact that the struggle for socialism and against capitalism has yet to succeed is probative of nothing. How many centuries did it take for human society to go from slavocracy and feudalism to bourgeois democracy? Quite a few. We also have yet to develop a cure for Parkinson's disease. Shall we conclude that a cure is impossible and that we should give up? (That was a rhetorical question.)
Socialism is a rational, historically grounded and future-oriented way of thinking based on an objective assessment of reality. Broadly speaking, we can define socialism as a democratic system of economic and social organization that prioritizes social need rather than private profit. It has to be global, not isolated in a single nation-state. It is to be distinguished from Stalinism, Maoism, North Korea, and so forth. Authoritarianism and corruption are on a different axis from socialism versus capitalism.
Now consider capitalism. Its invariable result is inequality, repression, environmental destruction and imperialist war. This is not to say there was not inequality and violence in pre-capitalist societies. I am saying that with capitalism, inequality and social misery are not a bug but a feature. Exploitation and extraction are how it works; war among competing imperial powers is its inexorable conseqence. Marxist theory has been borne out time and again. Under global capitalism, humanity is on a collision course with catastrophe. Increasingly, people understand this -- especially the younger generations. Socialism is a dirty word to those who are still thoroughly indoctrinated in capitalist ideology -- the prevailing ideology of the ruling classes. If there is to be human civilization a hundred years from now, it will be socialist because it cannot be otherwise.
Wow... So glad to know that others realize now that the Reds all along had it right! (Correct, I mean.) How can any system that functions under the premise that "only the strong will survive and prosper" and sees all the rest of us lowly workers as "consumers" or cattle ever bring about peace and harmony on this planet? (Answer, it can't function--it's inherently dysfunctional.)
The older I get (85 in a month), the more I think Marx was right. And that means the Communists in China and Russia were wrong. I will stick with Orwell, whose critique of totalitarianism (1984/Animal Farm) exposes the lies of the monster (as Khruschev called Stalin) who ruled the Soviet Union for decades in total defiance of Marx. And as for Mao, he was a another psychopath who, fortunately, has been succeeded by wise rulers who have brought China out of the cesspool created by Mao and rule with patience and moderation.
I am closer to being a communist (in the Marxian sense) than ever in my life, but those who ran things in China and the Soviet Union did so in total disregard for Marx's view that communism could only arise in a mature capitalist society, never in a poor, semi-feudal backwater like Russia or China.
I think the Soviet criticism of the West was basically correct and the Western criticism by Orwell and others was correct about the terrible flaws of the Soviet Union. Today's communist leaders are moderate and pragmatic, playing the long game. They understand that before there can be communism, there must be industrialization, concentrations of wealth, and the contradictions of capitalism must play out. Neither Stalin nor Mao understood this and their ignorance led to vicious criminality.
If we say the communists were right, it is imperative to say which ones: those most right were eliminated as traitors. Trotsky got an ax in the skull; and in China, hundreds of thousands of CCP officials were persecuted; many died through execution, suicide under duress, or prison abuse.
See The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 — Frank Dikötter
Focus: Ground-level purge violence
Strengths:
Based on newly opened Chinese archives.
Shows how mass denunciations and killings unfolded locally.
Details torture, struggle sessions, executions.
Part of Dikötter’s trilogy on Maoist campaigns."
I suggest avoiding blanket generalizations and defining terms. I suggest not taking sides. In doing so we betray the truth, for both sides lie alongside some accurate criticism. There is only one thing worth fighting for, and that is peace (Camus), and there is only one party worth joining, and that is the party of truth. And all the while, let us be humble and admit that we make mistakes and then learn from them. That is what the best in the West (democratic socialists et al) and in the communist universe have done.
If you put this in context with what capitalist nations have been doing during the same time, and ignore Western-biased sources, you find that much of this is propaganda, and represents and incomplete story.
Mao is the reason China is an independent state and not languishing in poverty like India. Stalin, for being a dictator, in context defeated the Nazis who invaded the USSR and killed 20+ million people, while also facing hostile Western isolation, and eventually remilitarization for Europe, the creation of NATO absorbing the remains of Nazi West Germany into it. Tense times.
Can't separate any of this from context.
"When Plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in society, over the course of time they will create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it"
-Frederic Bastiat
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The Truth is, modern capitalist world would not exist without colonialism and the drain of resources (incl. slaves) from the colonies..
youtube.com/watch?v=35Ax-psPZ1g
youtube.com/watch?v=_HEs2CnVQUs
youtube.com/watch?v=OOF56wYTl1w
youtube.com/watch?v=FgIWQZVaWio
youtube.com/watch?v=5luQB_yFmTM
youtu.be/LJlRIHUfsxs?t=1347
***
Why do you think African countries have such straight borders? Look up Berlin Conference in 1885.
youtu.be/LJlRIHUfsxs?t=1042
youtu.be/bOMti9K2O3c?t=537
***
"Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter"
-Old African proverb
***
"Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence."
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
***
"Imperialism meant Capitalism expansion. It meant that European Capitalists were forced by the internal logic of their competitive system to seek abroad in less developed countries, opportunities to control raw materials, to find markets, and find profitable field of investment"
-Walter Rodney, "How Europe underdeveloped Africa", 1972
youtu.be/LJlRIHUfsxs?t=1160
One of the Key principles of Imperialism is to keep the colonies underdeveloped (or more precisely, overexploited). It's called "unequal exchange relations".
Thus the products of colonies (resources) are consistently undervalued, and the products of metropolis (Tech/Industrial goods) are consistently overvalued.
youtube.com/watch?v=ATKBU32rWGs
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That's why the Brits destroyed the textile industry in India - they forced them to import the textile from Britain, where capitalists were already in the crisis of overproduction":
sgbgatelier.com/world/2019/11/21/5-ways-imperial-britain-crippled-indian-handlooms
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Observe the capital flows of the British Empire. Wealth generated from the colonies of Asia, India, Africa, and Caribbean were used to solely develop North America, Europe, and Oceania.
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That's why people in Western countries work the fewest hours, while receive the highest wages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours
***
And this is exactly why the Western capitalists moved their industries to Asia for cheap labor.
A correction, kinda.
Until the zebra learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter
Thank you, ChatterX.
Well said, Ian Brown. China lifting millions out of poverty and now surpassing the west - in values and technology - is the natural progression from Mao. The same goes for Stalin for making possible the Soviet Union, for Putin now to stand to win a proxy war against the US/NATO. If Gorbachov too wasn't blinded by western propaganda, they could have reformed the Soviet Union.
Generations go on handing down the propaganda. Myths do live on.
I thought Lenin was the one who began the fight to become a Soviet nation?
All three, I have read something interesting from Marx about that very project and it was a project. Marx actually told all three they would fail not having gone through the steps. Avoiding Capitalism did not allow innovation and technology to advance. Which I can understand. I would love to see that in Marx's own handwriting though ha. Makes perfect sense seeing what we see from history and current event's. The question for me and for you, have we stayed with Capitalism so long we have no flexibility to move to Communism. The Chinese seem to be on the path if we let them continue. Can the Chinese now move to Communism or will they fall victim to Capitalism? Love to know what you think.
"From The Communist Manifesto (1848), by Marx and Engels:
“The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.”
And further:
“It has created enormous cities… vastly increased the urban population… created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”
Marx’s point: capitalism builds the industrial capacity communism will later inherit.
3) Capitalism produces its own successor
Also from The Communist Manifesto:
“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.”
Capitalism creates the proletariat — the class that can overthrow it.
4) Historical sequencing of modes of production
From Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
“No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed.”
This is one of Marx’s clearest formulations:
A system (like capitalism) must fully develop productive capacity before it can be replaced.
5) Capitalism centralizes production — enabling socialism
From Capital, Volume I:
“Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital… grows the mass of misery… but with this too grows the revolt of the working class… trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.”
Capitalism unintentionally organizes the workforce needed for socialist transformation.
What Marx did not argue
He did not believe:
Poor peasant societies could leap directly to communism
Agrarian economies had the productive base for socialism
Revolution should bypass industrialization
That’s why Marx expected socialist revolution first in:
Britain
Germany
Advanced capitalist economies
Not in Russia or China — which he saw as economically premature.
Bottom line
Marx’s sequence:
Feudalism
Capitalism (industrialization, productivity, proletariat formation)
Socialism
Communism
His core logic:
Capitalism is historically necessary — not morally good, but materially indispensable — because it creates the productive abundance communism requires."
That is understood by current Chinese leaders who have incorporated a huge capitalist private sector into the development of China, viewed as necessary to prepare for the transition in the future to communisml
Centralizing production does not lead to local democracy... it leads to totalitarianism, whether capitalist or commie.. real commies live independently of central authority... I mean if we haven't learned that yet......
Lenin founded the Soviet Union.
Stalin built it into a superpower.
And in the process, he brutalized the society it rested on.
Mao made
China poorer, and it was rejecting his legacy that brought about the enrichment of China. ") Autarky: Mao cut China off from the world
Mao distrusted trade, markets, and foreign capital.
So China:
Isolated itself technologically
Missed post-war global growth
Failed to absorb modern manufacturing methods
Lagged far behind Japan, Korea, Taiwan
By the 1970s:
China was poorer than South Korea
Less productive than Taiwan
Comparable to some of the poorest nations on earth
Not because it lacked people or land — but because it rejected integration.
6) Politics replaced feedback — and feedback is everything
In Mao’s system:
Bad news was dangerous
Truth was “counter-revolutionary”
Loyalty mattered more than results
So:
Failures were hidden
Mistakes were repeated
Correction came late or never
That’s how you turn errors into catastrophes.
The hard comparison
By 1976 (Mao’s death):
China’s per-capita income ≈ India’s
Life materially grim
Productivity extremely low
Vast rural poverty
China only escapes poverty after Mao, when leaders quietly:
Restore incentives
Allow markets
Encourage trade
Stop mass campaigns
They never say “Mao was wrong” outright — but every reform contradicts Maoism."
Mao made China poorer than when? Before the PRC was established? The Century of Humiliation?
Estimated median household income — China (very rough)
Year Est. median household income (2020 USD) Context
1920 ~$1,000 – $1,500 Late warlord era, agrarian poverty
1940 ~$900 – $1,300 War devastation, Japanese invasion
1960 ~$700 – $1,100 Great Leap famine collapse
2020 ~$7,000 – $8,500 Upper-middle income developing economy
Yes: "Long-run Mao era vs. pre-Communist China
By Mao’s death (1976):
Better than pre-1949 in:
Life expectancy (~65 vs ~40)
Literacy
Basic public health
Land equality
Worse or stagnant in:
Per capita income
Consumer goods
Agricultural productivity
Industrial efficiency
China remained extremely poor compared to global peers." 15-30 millioin died in the human caused famine.
Look at all the previous famines in China. Each was pretty comparable in devastation to the 1959 save they also weren't coming out of an extremely brutal 20th Century war. By that time they had not yet been able dig themselves out of the 150+ year hole, esp under global sanction, and being denied official nationhood in the UN (Republic of China taking the seat).
It is established that some was exacerbated by mismanagement and experiments with collective farming that didn't really work out, but again not a whole lot worse from previous famines before communism or Mao.
Ultimately the introduction of markets was necessary to generate wealth, but they would not have been able to control them without the party state that Mao established, and would have reverted to exploited status.
"Failures were hidden / Mistakes were repeated"
Yeah, I'm sure that odious Western freedom of speech and press would have REALLY fucked that up even WORSE!
"Allow markets"
??? What's this, are there now Marxist markets? I suppose as long as a self-selected "expert" vanguard stealth manipulator sets the rules. Is that how it works?
Propaganda is found everywhere. It relies on self-appointed power-grabbing "experts" like yourself to grabbing bullhorns and be pulling cons perpetually. It relies on maximization of Aristotle's ethos over logos.
You think the press is free? Have you heard of market socialism. Who is "yourself?"
"You think the press is free?"
Oh, another wordsmithing 3-card monte player. No, I do not think "the press is free"; whatever that sequence of words means here, but I am confident FUD is your objective (it works like the switcheroo FUD of "illegal alien" and "no human is illegal").
I believe in "freedom of the press" and "freedom of speech". Wikipedia, for all its faults, is probably good enough here.
"Have you heard of market socialism[?]"
I believe in capitalist-socialist hybrids, truly democratically run. From my reading, Marx and descendants are quite allergic to the idea of pure democracy, whatever they tout in public and on their banners.
'Who is "yourself?"'
I dunno. Still working on that. Don't my crazed posts tell you what you need to know? Or is your objective here to keep me from speaking, because I never mastered the arts of manipulation?
"Stalin did not fight as a battlefield commander in the Bolshevik Revolution itself.
His role in 1917 was political and organizational.
He became involved in military affairs during the subsequent Civil War, mainly as a political commissar and regional war administrator.
Compared to figures like Trotsky, his direct combat and strategic military role was limited.
Stalin did participate in the Civil War, mainly as a political–military administrator.
He transformed that limited operational role into a major legitimacy asset.
Built loyal officer networks from Civil War allies.
Used war memory to outmaneuver Trotsky politically.
Later rewrote official history to magnify his battlefield importance." Conclusion: bullshit.
On the contrary, it took a radical shift from the deep economic hole Mao dug, to start the engine of Chinese prosperity and advance. Nor did Stalin make the Soviet Union possible. With such views, perhaps you should do some study before making claims that counter histrory
Mao destroyed the economy and Stalin did not make the Soviet Union possible. He inherited power and created a totalitarian state.
Without Stalin the Soviet Union would be the cowboy frontier of the East Reich.
Words are cheap. Do you think the USSR had no other leaders capable of surviving the Nazi attack? Why?
Yeah, and if he did make USSR great again, so what?
"[China] now surpassing the west"
The uber-capitalist psychopathic globalists contributed to that, just as much as China did. But now the former's plan to hollow out America and move to greener pastures is blowing up in their faces, in the form of populism all over the West.
But now China has its *own* grinding capitalist machine run by a dictatorship! Yippee!! Yes, do stay tuned to China and see how it goes from here. My only fear is that now that they've been cross-pollinating with capitalists, when they blow up you'll be able to blame the Westerners exclusively.
"Mao is the reason China is an independent state and not languishing in poverty like India."
Not following you here... China languished in poverty from the time Mao took over, all the way until his death more than a quarter-century later, and then some.
As a teenager, I asked my dad why he was a commie, and got the answer which later in life made me a commie too, and still am, after so much studying and fighting; he said, smiling: " because Communism is justice. And freedom".
"Socialism or Barbarism!"
- Rosa Luxemburg
You know I keep her little book where I can see the title from where I read. A true intellect and hero. Every child one day will know her name. : )
Well, Stalin and Mao were all about freedom, if you have lost your mind.
What frigging freedom are you talking about? Freedom is the most stupid and nonsense phrase ever invented.
I can name you at least 10 reasons why you are not free, nowhere ever.
First, Mao is the reason China is independent and the Century of Humiliation didn't continue.
Second, look at every single metric from life expectancy, literacy, wealth, etc etc all took off with Mao. Look at China before Mao, and after. The dividing line is right there.
People always say that it was Deng "embracing" capitalism that changed everything. Yet India embraced capitalism from its independence, and look at it now.
"Mao is the reason China is independent and the Century of Humiliation didn't continue."
But it did live in poverty for many decades. With a continuation of th famines that drove people to flee, as well as that lovely re-invigoration, the "Cultural Revolution", until...
"People always say that it was Deng 'embracing' capitalism that changed everything... "
But it did. This is the thing that it appears Marxists studiously ignore. I can only conclude that the cog-dis must be overwhelming.
"... Yet India embraced capitalism from its independence, and look at it now."
Cultural differences. Also, India's globalist upper classes are doing very well, thank you.
Look, Marxism simply does not address any number of facts about human nature. And, believe me, I have less than zero love for unfettered capitalism.
Again, China started in extreme poverty, coming out of colonial domination and a brutal war, and was isolated from the world economic system at behest of the capitalist powers. They had to build from essentially zero. Not sure why you think it's some kind of win that it took them a while to dig themselves out of that hole after they broke the colonial chains.
India is not because of a cultural difference. It is because Deng specifically introduced controlled markets as a way of having trade integration with the world (which was cut off) and generating wealth with the global system that exists, so that they could direct it to their development priorities. This was always led by the communist party and under their control. Without Mao building the foundation, they would have been just as unable to control their destiny as India, they would have been overrun, kept in poverty and without development.
"Not sure why you think it's some kind of win that it took them a while to dig themselves out of that hole after they broke the colonial chains."
That's not quite what think happened, or rather, what I mean...
The transition away from Communist dictatorship could only occur, and did occur, only (a few years) after a specific person -- Mao -- was removed. That is not an organic process of growing out of poverty, five-year plans notwithstanding (or are they rewriting *that* history, too?) For example, the new rulers quite consciously removed restrictions on low-level internal trade (e.g. street vendors).
The important thing about that had an *ideological* effect on the common people, specifically to question what communism was actually advocating, if all of a sudden they could themselves participate in the same free trade that was previously demonized. This was (known to be) a proven-successful path to *material* success, even if cultural aspects, including materially equality, could suffer. But the powers-that-be had already made such a horrific mess of that in the Cultural Revolution, it was a rather easy choice.
If Mao had not been a maniacal psychopath, China could have risen economically instead of failing economically.
This assumes China could not have been industrialized without Mao's fatal autoarky and failed economic policies, which later leaders proved WAS possible.
'human nature' (usually referring to psychological traits) is largely malleable and not a real argument, imo. marxism actually starts off from 'human nature' (basic necessities) and real material conditions (the 'economy').
Deng did not "embrace" capitalism: it was far different from India
"Deng rejected ideological labels. His famous line:
“It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
Meaning: results over doctrine.
He never said China should become capitalist — he said it should become rich and powerful.
What Deng actually changed
1) Agriculture: dismantling Maoist collectivism
Under Deng:
Household Responsibility System
Families farmed their own plots
Could sell surplus for profit
Result:
Immediate surge in food production
Rural incomes rose sharply
This reintroduced private incentive — a capitalist feature.
2) Private enterprise legalized (gradually)
Early reforms allowed:
Small family businesses
Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs)
Later, fully private firms
But:
Land stayed state-owned
Key sectors stayed public
So private capital existed — under party oversight.
3) Foreign investment invited
This plugged China into global capitalism without fully liberalizing domestically.
Even as markets expanded, the Communist Party retained control of:
Banking
Energy
Steel
Telecommunications
Defense
So China never privatized the core of its economy like the USSR later did.
Markets serve socialism — socialism doesn’t yield to markets.
Non-capitalist features
One-party rule
State land ownership
Party control of finance
Industrial policy planning
Political limits on capital
So it’s hybrid —
Deng didn’t make China capitalist.
He made capitalism work for a communist state."
" 'It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.' / Meaning: results over doctrine."
Excellent! I'm glad you're blue-pilled into rejecting doctrine. Now we can get to work into real stuff, which permits a full-democratic taking from: socialism (Leftism; France's 'egalite') *AND* capitalism (Rightism; France's 'liberte') *AND* most especially, culture (Nationalism; France's 'fraternite')
The last of these, culture, was apparently chucked wholesale during Marx's FUD-ing of nationhood. He seemed to think ignoring it verbally, while simultaneously creating intra-national *wars*, would make it go away :/ But here we are again, with nationalist populism breaking out all over the place...
Mao used humiliation and torture to enforce his power: "Humiliation was one of the central tools used during the Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao Zedong. It wasn’t incidental — it was systematic, public, and politically purposeful.
Here’s how it functioned.
1) “Struggle sessions” — ritualized public humiliation
Targets (teachers, officials, intellectuals, “class enemies”) were forced into mass denunciation meetings.
Common features:
Forced confessions
Public shouting and insults
Physical intimidation
Beatings in some cases
Crowds chanting accusations
Victims were made to admit ideological crimes — often fabricated.
Purpose:
Break resistance
Produce submission
Demonstrate revolutionary power
2) Degrading physical postures
Victims were often forced into stress positions, especially the infamous:
“Airplane position”
Bent forward
Arms twisted upward behind the back
It was painful, humiliating, and visually theatrical.
People were displayed like criminals even when no legal charges existed.
3) “Dunce caps” and placards
Targets were paraded wearing:
Tall dunce hats
Placards listing alleged crimes
Labels like “counter-revolutionary,” “capitalist roader,” “traitor”
They were marched through streets or workplaces for public ridicule.
4) Forced self-denunciation writings
Victims had to write:
Confession statements
Self-criticisms
Ideological repentance essays
Refusal could escalate punishment.
These documents were often read aloud to crowds.
5) Attacks on personal dignity
Humiliation extended beyond meetings:
Homes ransacked
Family heirlooms destroyed
Books burned
Hair cut publicly
Glasses broken (symbol of intellectualism)
It was meant to strip social identity, not just political position.
6) Children denouncing parents
In extreme cases:
Students denounced teachers
Children denounced parents
Spouses denounced each other
This inverted Confucian social hierarchies — intentionally.
It demonstrated loyalty to Mao over family bonds."
I can write you an essay how the capitalists did subversion, infiltration, sabotage and corruption in China and every other country that didn't bow to capitalism. The counterrevolution is still trying to weaken China, so how to fight the enemy within your society?
Wealth no, China was poorer than India: "Life expectancy, literacy, and basic health did surge under Mao
✔ China after 1949 was far better off socially than before
But:
✘ Wealth did not “take off” under Mao
✘ Per-capita income remained extremely low
✘ The economic explosion came after market reforms"
Marx, said you have to go through Capitalism to create a Communist system. I remember reading he scolded Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin for not staying the course. Seems Marx was right looking at China today.
Could that be part of a process to success which you have to admit China is. They are not Communists yet however they I believe are on a far better path is we let them. I have no idea where we in the u.s. are going, Fascism?
The Communist Party claims China is a socialist nation on the path to communism. Communism is a vision of a world without alienation or oppression, stateless, classless, and without circulating money, a society based on participatory democracy without the need for centralized power. This is progress by contradicion to fill in the missing elements of dialetical materialism, explaining why Communist nations enable a private sector to help build wealth, industrialize, and create job, deliberately inserting a private sector to produce the industrialized, wealthy nations Marx saw as the seedbed of the transition through socialism to communism.
The question that haunts political scientists and great thinkers like Arendt and Orwell is whether powerful ruling elites, the vanguard or the dictatorship of the workers, can ever relinquish power, which has its own seductive power to induce a mentality not of surrendering but of holding on and seeking more. Can an ideology of building great power and seeing it "wither away" withstand the aphrodesiac of power? WE cannot reject a future we do not know but it is unlikely and so there may be a further dialectic after capitalism in which state socialism ( often wrongly called state capitalism, which is a contradiction in terms, unless we mean corporate fascism, the enemy of socialism) forms a new contradiction, leading to a further resolution beyond what we see today.
Only time will tell.
Stalin generously put the Russian people in the path of the Nazi War Machine. They did stop the machine, and at great cost. More regard for the nation than for it's people as other genocides make clear.
This is kind of nonsense, though. The Nazis explicit goal from the beginning, and the reason Hitler was supported by New York and London early on was to fight communism. The Lebensraum project was always to take place in the USSR which Hitler compared to the Indian populated prairies of North America, ripe for colonization.
Millions and millions of people died before the Soviets were able to raise a large enough army to fight back and drive Hitler back home to Berlin. They defeated the Nazis almost single handedly, and along with China, bore the largest sacrifice of fighting fascism.
Could Trotsky have pulled victory from the jaws of defeat and saved Europe and the world from the Nazis?
Would Trotsksy have been so stupid as to make a deal with the treacherous Nazis and then be totally unprepared for the invasion. I doubt it since Trotsky was a military genius and "When the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution (1917), they had no functioning national army. Trotsky built one almost from scratch.////Under his leadership, the Red Army defeated multiple anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War (1917–1922).
So while not a battlefield tactician in the traditional sense, he was the regime’s principal military organizer and strategist.
How Trotsky viewed the Nazi–Soviet Pact
He was fiercely hostile to it.
The pact — formally the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939) — was signed between:
Joseph Stalin
Adolf Hitler
It included:
Non-aggression terms
Secret protocols dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence
Trotsky’s core criticisms
1) “Cynical betrayal of socialism”
From exile in Mexico, Trotsky argued Stalin had:
Abandoned international anti-fascism
Reduced Soviet policy to state survival
Collaborated with fascism for territorial gain
He saw it as ideological bankruptcy."
All the Western European countries attempted the same thing. Nobody wanted a war with Germany. The Soviets had just fought off a multi-front invasion during the Civil War.
But sure, the USSR could have charged in through Eastern Europe to save the day in the 1930s.
Sorry, not an expert on WW2. But from the docs i've seen, the west pumped a lot of military gear into the USSR. They kinda became the proxy for weakening Germany, and they paid the price... But as you say, the Nazis were going to ethnically cleanse the whole area.
As capitalists do, they funded both sides. The BIS in Swiss worked with Albert Speer until the end of WWII.
And the USSR paid every part of the so called landlease back to the USA. Britain made its latest payment to the US in 2008, I believe.
From their perspective and Europe's, they were not the proxy, but the main event, and the primary target of the Reich who considered slavs to be untermenschen and had plans for establishing aryan lebensraum in the East. Whatever temporary help the received from the other Allies (immediately cut off at the end of the war along with any notion of helping with reconstruction) the Soviets provided the bulk of the manpower, industrial power, and recourses that defeated the Nazis.
The US pretty much swooped in from France at the 11th hour when Germany was already starting to collapse and then claimed they won the whole thing. USSR won the war mostly on it's own, though Yugoslavia and the Greek communists also drove the Nazis out of their regions.
As this chart show, the “progress” in GDP came at the expense of vast suffering, while India kept pace, and the real takeoff was after MAO was dead and new leaders totally took a different approach to improving the standard of living.
“Most historians estimate 30–45 million people died from famine during this period, making it the largest famine in recorded history.
China’s GDP and food output fell sharply, leaving the country poorer than before.” The Great Leap Forward……MAO like Stalin was a monster…..
Ian Brown: On point!
Under Mao, China became poorer than India: "Mao is not the reason China escaped poverty.
In fact, Mao-era China was:
extremely poor
technologically backward
frequently starving
Hard facts:
Great Leap Forward
→ ~30–45 million deaths from famine
→ One of the worst human-made disasters in history
Cultural Revolution
→ Education destroyed
→ Scientific class purged
→ Economy stalled for a decade
By 1976 (Mao’s death):
China’s per-capita income was similar to or lower than India’s
Rural poverty was universal
Industry was inefficient and isolated
If Mao had continued governing unchallenged, China would still be poor.
The uncomfortable truth most narratives dodge
China’s escape from poverty happened after Mao, not because of him.
It was driven by:
Market reforms
Foreign trade
Incentives
Abandonment of Maoist economics
That pivot begins under Deng Xiaoping, who explicitly rejected Mao’s economic line while keeping Mao as a symbol.
Deng’s implicit message:
Mao saved the state. Mao nearly ruined the economy."
And Yes, the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany after 20 million killed but it was Stalin who made the disastrous "non-agrression pact" with the Nazis and was unprepared when they invaded. After Khruschev denounced Stalin for perverting socialism and betraying the revolution, Mao defended his use of terror: " Khrushchev condemned terror as betrayal of socialism.
Mao saw terror as intrinsic to revolution."
You are leaving out extremely important context. Again, what were the conditions in China like BEFORE Mao?
George Orwell was a rat for the OSS and sold out a bunch of his comrades, also called Paul Robeson “very anti-white.” The British caused famines that murdered millions of Indians during the same time as famines ravaged China.
Mao also raised life expectancy by almost 40 years during his leadership. And China has developed into the most responsible global power on the planet under communist leadership. Many of the crimes against Stalin were made up, the Big Black Book of Communism that alleges his body count exceeds that of Hitler has been thoroughly discredited. They counted Nazis killed during WW2 against him.
Of course, both these men committed atrocities, as all world leaders do. They got a lot of shit wrong, but they were ruling nations during a postwar period where the entirety of the world lived under authoritarian conditions cause they just had two global wars during a 30 year period. Comparing them to the likes of people like Hitler, or even white supremacist Churchill, is mostly the product of western propaganda. The west formed NATO post war, immediately attacked the Soviets who were their allies, and then spent the next several decades building neo-imperialism and capturing now some 75% of the world’s resources. They’ve also committed countless genocides since then, in Korea, Vietnam, Palestine, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, etc.
Doesn’t mean we can’t rightfully criticize what the communist leaders did get wrong and when they did overstep their bounds and have people murdered, but their societies also improved the lives of multiple millions of people. The Soviet Union went from a peasant serf nation living under autocracy to a global superpower with great education, healthcare and housing during Stalin’s rule. China ended foot binding and made divorce legal, liberating millions of women from abusive marriages.
I’d suggest reading Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti. Cause the most fuming commies were right about Stalin and Mao too.
"Fascism was the application to white people of colonial procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'coolies' of India, and the 'ni**ers' of Mrica."
-Aimé Fernand David Césaire
***
Simply speaking, Fascism is Imperialism brought home..
youtube.com/watch?v=k17q7hdVsTA
Seems truer today than ever.
British empire killed 165 million Indians in 40 years:
How Colonialism inspired Fascism:
youtube.com/watch?v=Ob_lIQRAnYM
"With unfailing consistency, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests."
-Michael Parenti (RIP)
michael-parenti.org
It's often forgotten that Stalin had to deal with Trotsky and the like who were installed by the ancestors of the modern banking "elite", and most of the "communist" atrocities attributed to Stalin actually took place during their rule (the ritual murder of Russian poet Sergey Yesenin comes to mind). Stalin was no saint either, but it can be argued that the main reason he was demonized was because he kicked out the bankers' cartel puppets (similar to Putin) and changed the course of WWII. Ironically, the first country to recognize the communist revolution in 1917 was USA.
Thank you. A friend re-wrote a book on the topic of Stalin. Being from the u.s. evil empire I had no idea.
"Of course, both these men committed atrocities, as all world leaders do."
All world leaders commit atrocities because no world leaders get to where they are without being psychopaths. Psychopathy is the problem.
I don’t know that Stalin was a psychopath. He was certainly driven paranoid by all the constant western intervention in his society and their funding counterrevolutionary and fascist forces and spreading propaganda everywhere. I think he was under more pressure than maybe any world leader in history, and made a lot of mistakes because of that and didn’t have good solutions. Considering what we now know about the Epstein files and how the vast majority of people executed by the Soviet govt were fascists and capitalists, like there weren’t good solutions for how to deal with all of that. Basically, gulags or death. You can’t put pedophiles and sadist torturers in general society. Also, Stalin was one man in a country of hundreds of millions, there was a vast body of local and state officials also involved in all of that. It was maybe the most difficult time any country has ever had, recovering from losing 27 million people while rebuilding and industrializing. Most leaders would not have held that nation together.
Oh yeah, and when the Soviet Union fell, the people the west put in charge put child slavery rings into practice, something communists had somehow been holding back. Because yeah, if you’re fighting capitalists who have rape and murder parties on secret islands with everyone else’s kids, like yeah, you might need to use some authoritarian measures to protect people. None of what happens in the world happens in a vacuum. Trump is a psychopath. Stalin is a man who lived through several mass trauma events and was obviously affected deeply by it. He also tried to resign multiple times and they wouldn’t let him. He wasn’t a power hungry monster. He was the first brown leader of a European power on a continent run by white supremacists who were scared communists would dismantle their power and make them stop killing people for profits.
"the vast majority of people executed by the Soviet govt were fascists and capitalists,"
Tens of millions of people were "fascists and capitalists" who deserved *death*?
"... [T]here weren’t good solutions for how to deal with all of that. Basically, gulags or death."
"Trump is a psychopath. [In contrast..] Stalin is a man who lived through several mass trauma events and was obviously affected deeply by it." !!!
"He [Stalin?] wasn’t a power hungry monster. He was the first brown leader of a European power on a continent run by white supremacists" !!!!
Poor Stalin! /s The best way I can think to respond to this breathtaking rationalization of Stalin's manifest psychopathy is the well-known Nietzsche quote, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."
Is this what is going on in so-called "Leftist" minds today? Holy cow! No wonder the US is going mad and on the verge of civil war! And goodness knows I have no love for Trump, capitalism, or Rightism...
----------
"You can’t put pedophiles and sadist torturers in general society."
Side note: Paranoia, pedophilia, sadism, and psychopathy are all different conditions, and can occur in any combination.
Funny that you quote the favorite philosopher of Nazis to make that very anticommunist point. Stalin didn’t murder tens of millions of people. There are no historical sources that corroborate that number. He did defeat the Nazis though. Nothing in there is rationalization. It’s historical analysis that accurately understands what the global and national conditions were then and now. The problem isn’t psychopathy. It’s capitalism.
Stalin improved the lives of millions of people and oversaw the fastest growing economy on the history of the planet. He was adored by millions upon millions of poor brown people and scholars alike, like WEB DuBois who wrote a eulogy to him calling him a Black Legend. Yes, he also made some brutal errors. And abused his power. But I promise you, if you read the historical narrative from global south and socialist perspectives and find the accurate accounting of that particular time in human history, you find a truly different portrait of the man. Sure, you can continue to believe the one taught to you by the same people that tell you alive breeding child rapists like Thomas Jefferson were bad men with good ideas. But read Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds, or Domemic Losurdo’s Stalin: A History and Critique of a Black Legend. The latter is free from Iskra Books.
The same people who taught you Stalin was a monster are the people who taught you Christopher Columbus was a hero. Why were they so afraid of him? Maybe because his methods were effective at stopping psychopaths.
All important points and facts, Mr. Hilbig. I wonder why it is that even intelligent people who've read independent historians like Parenti and are aware of the many atrocities of imperialist capitalists remain anti-Stalin, anti-communist? It demonstrates to me how insidious the capitalists' psyop is, perpetrated through their CIA goons. Read Gabriel Rockhill's book: "Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?" where he discusses the CIA's program--the Congress of Cultural Freedom--which propagandized many Western intellectuals.
You've certainly got a bizarre understanding of what psychopaths are. I'd re-read the definition, and consider diagnosing your acceptance of all the killings in the name of economics and politics, no matter what the number.
"Stalin improved the lives of millions of people and oversaw the fastest growing economy on the history of the planet."
Bullshit. The country went down the tubes from then on, in perpetual grinding misery until it finally imploded. More importantly for Marxism, he was the first to really give it a bad name. Even an outreach guy like Gorbachev couldn't rescue what had finally become of it by the 1980s, the people were so demoralized. Once Gorby pulled the cork, the outrage was unstoppable. (I was watching it all in real time, were you?) And then in the '90s, and at least on this you and I certainly must agree, the Western vultures came in. But more than that, it was *native* psychopaths who became the kleptocrat oligarchs.
Under Joseph Stalin (1924–1953):
Real gains
Rapid industrialization (steel, coal, heavy industry).
Mass electrification.
Expansion of literacy and technical education.
Urbanization and scientific development.
USSR emerged as a superpower after WWII.
Many peasants did move into industrial jobs; some experienced upward mobility.
But omitted costs
Forced collectivization → mass famine (notably the Holodomor and wider Soviet famine of 1932–33).
Gulag forced labor system.
Political purges and executions.
Mass deportations of ethnic groups." And I would add a catastrophic deal to divide Poland with Hitler than led to the German invasion and 25 million dead Soviet citizens. And as for economic growth; it was at a great cost and other nation have done far better without the mass slaughter and brutality: Other economies (postwar Japan, South Korea, China under Deng) matched or exceeded sustained growth with far less mortality.
DeBois? "Du Bois’s praise reflected his political alignment and Cold War context.
He did not have access to later archival evidence on purges/famines.
Many scholars view his eulogy as ideological rather than historical assessment." Many left thinkers did break after Khrushchev’s speech:
Party members in Europe resigned.
Western communists split into reform vs orthodox camps.
Some Marxist scholars re-evaluated Stalin sharply.
Du Bois was not part of that wave of repudiation." I would bid you reread 1984 and Animal Farm for a different view of Stalin.
"Based on NKVD and state records:
Executions (political)
~700,000–1.2 million
Mostly during the Great Purge (1937–38)
Gulag deaths
~1.5–2 million
Deportation mortality
Hundreds of thousands to ~1 million
Subtotal (direct repression):
≈ 3–5 million deaths
These are the most conservative archival figures.
4) Famine — the largest disputed category
The major famine tied to collectivization:
Holodomor
Plus broader Soviet famine mortality.
Estimates vary widely:
3–5 million (low)
5–7 million (mid)
7+ million (high)
Debates center on intent:
Deliberate genocide?
Criminal negligence?
Policy disaster?
But mortality itself is not seriously disputed."
It all made sense until you wrote "Anti-Hip
Anti-Hip
3d
"the vast majority of people executed by the Soviet govt were fascists and capitalists,"
Tens of millions of people were "fascists and capitalists" who deserved *death*?
"... [T]here weren’t good solutions for how to deal with all of that. Basically, gulags or death."
"Trump is a psychopath. [In contrast..] Stalin is a man who lived through several mass trauma events and was obviously affected deeply by it." !!!
"He [Stalin?] wasn’t a power hungry monster. He was the first brown leader of a European power on a continent run by white supremacists" !!!!
Poor Stalin! /s The best way I can think to respond to this breathtaking rationalization of Stalin's manifest psychopathy is the well-known Nietzsche quote, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."
Is this what is going on in so-called "Leftist" minds today" Here's a clue: leftists want to get rid of Trump and Maga fascist brutality, universal healthcare, the end of big money in politics, green energy, shared prosperity, the rights of labor, the end of support for Israel, and the replacement of oligarchy with a democratic republic. Don't tell us malice what we stand for: ask us and watch how we vote and march.
Saying the Communists are right about capitalism is not the same thing as saying that Stalin and Mao made no mistakes.
We all make mistakes.
Like America in Vietnam, Iraq, slavery, Indian genocide, neoliberalism, big oopsies. But at least we aren't the bad guy like those guys.
Oh, all of OUR mistakes were made with the very best of intentions, so we can forgive ourselves even before we make them.
It’s very convenient.
Disastrous policy is not a mistake; it is planned failure.
Well, were they Communists or not? Were they right?
dale ruff, nothing much to say!.
🥱🙂↔️🙄☹️🙂↕️🥱
You might as well say that the people that are right are your beloved Obamas and Clintons, since you always vote democrap amiright dale?
No. I vote for the lesser evil, given no other choice. I assume you either vote for the greater evil or a 3d party (as I did with Nader and Stein, which gave us Bush and Trump) or which helps the greater evil, or did nothing, in smug superiority: "All that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing." I view Clinton as a corrupt leader who moved Democrats to the right and Obama a great disappointment. You can try to push me into a mold you can then despise, but you are wrong on all counts. Who did you vote for?
You vote for evil. You say that Mao made china Poorer (which is a big fat lie), yet believe Clintons made the US richer? Or even the world?
Funny how the "evil" people are always the enemies of US empire, and "the best we have" is just another flavor of imperialistic plunder.
I'd rather have Mao with all his flaws, than the funders of Epstein and the war in Gaza.
At least *some* of what Mao did was good, can't say the same for Clinton and Biden, who are 100% (if not 1000% considering all we don't know) bad.
They can be right *in general* while also making bad practical calls *in the moment* that we recognize in hindsight were ill-considered
You are three years older than me and I have concluded that our societies must be a mixture of ideologies as none are complete in themselves. Capitalism has ruined the West, liberalism is dead, and socialism has to be resurrected and conservatives are a fraud having sold their souls to capitalism and its forever wars. Neoliberalism has done horrendous damage to democracy and our values. I have no party affiliation and vote strategically for the best person or lesser evil. Elections are no more than dog and pony shows.
"Fascism is always the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism."
- Chris Hedges
Yes a great book.
Yes, hybrids are the most successful, using what works best. Elections are one of the many means available......along with protests, strikes, etc. Even Marx though that communism might be achieved without bloodshed thru democratic means.
We seem to be coming from the same space. I do wonder if it's possible to make change in the u..s without it all being destroyed system wise. We just didn't make the transition to Socialism in time, early 70s maybe while unions still had some power.
People are starting to learn the power of their labor through General Strikes I see around the world. We are all Palestinian now.
All I really know about the rise of communism in China and Russia is what I learned living in a capitalist society. Still, given the arts and literature, music and theatre produced in Russia both pre and post revolution, calling it a feudal backwater seems completely wrong.
What I do know, from my lived experience, is that Western powers spent rivers of blood to prevent countries who embraced communism from succeeding, and made all out war against their own labor classes to destroy any whiff of collectivism.
Yeah, I've had to totally re-evaluate all the "history" I was taught. Most of it was propaganda, and where there is complexity I also have to deal with the deep cognitive programming of The Judge, that as an American it is my role to armchair judge the deep struggles of other societies, especially while my own society is totally messed up and not even trying to do better. Time to let that chauvinism and arrogance go too.
I understand TheJudge exactly, though I find him as ruthless against myself as he is against others.
Not completely wrong,,,perhaps needing clarification: "Russia: semi-feudal, late-industrializing, politically frozen
China: not feudal, but agrarian, overpopulated, and imperial-damaged
Both: weak middle classes, weak capitalism, strong revolutionary pressure
So:
Communism didn’t overthrow advanced capitalism in either place.
It replaced failed paths to modernization.
That’s why Mao and Stalin look less like Marx’s heirs and more like brutal state-builders trying to do in decades what Europe took centuries to do." The point of my rhetoric was to contrast with the requirements for communism that Marx articulate, as possible only in highly industrialized, mature capitalist nations with concentrations of wealth and a robust bourgoisie, which both China and Russia lacked, being poor mostly agrarian nations.
Dale, respectfully, how do you know what you think you know about Russia or China? At the time of the Russian revolution, only a few states had begun industrialization. At the time of the rise of communism in China, many nations were still agrarian.
And I don’t know what you mean by ‘weak capitalism,’ as capitalism is currently destroying the people of this planet.
What marked the revolutions in China, Russia, and France was a vast level of income inequality. Kind of what we have now. Sadly for the kings and emperors of France, China, and Russia, they didn’t have Peter Thiel and the ability to spy on all the people all of the time.
Hell, the Renaissance was, for the average frustrated european peasant, far worse materially than the High Middle Ages, but the Renaissance certainly produced its share of arts, literature and music.
I suspect the average Renaissance peasant worked fewer hours than the normal working class modern Westerner.
China was wrong? China had ended poverty in 2021...meaning that 800+ million people now live a decent life. Democracy? There is too much to say about that...May I suggest reading Pino Arlacchi's "China explained to the West", for a start? He us a illustrissimo scholar, not a journalist
Imagine you just founded a new nation out of a revolution which got renamed a "civil war" after you succeeded in taking hold of the government, and many foreign nations chipped in to help the minority continue the take down this new government. Imagine that it still didn't end the opposition when the "civil war" formally ended. Imagine it this way. Imagine the USA had 100s of 1000s of people doing what Timothy McVeigh was accused of doing running around your country, some organized externally, sabotage in the mines and factories... What solutions do you have? You say you're a Marxist: what does this problem/resolution look like when you apply dialectical historical materialism?
Keep following Caitlin's advise, you'll get past those obstacles. I recommend reading "Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism" by Gabriel Rockhill. And take this comment by Caitlin more to heart "you live under a capitalist power structure which aggressively indoctrinates its populace from birth into believing that communism is No No Bad Bad" It runs deeper than we think until we've done the work that this article is all about.
Communism in its truest format would benefit everyone but the extremely wealthy, So they could not allow it to happen. I'm reading about that in a book based around WWI and how America got UK, France and some others to, secretly, send soldiers to stop the Bolsheviks startinga Soviet Russian Republic, first time in my 85 years, 86 in April (so ahead of you,Dale) that I understood what soviet meant, I'm ashamed to admit. Way back in my twenties, I used to wonder why we didn't have that system, now I think because everything Russia had to be bad, not that that has changed even today.
Great post.
Nuance is the enemy of the left and right tribes.
It is important to both criticize and praise our governmental systems and the countries that run with them.
China under Deng Xiaoping and others raised millions out of poverty and built the second largest economy. China has build good train infrastructure. However, we must not forget the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and human rights abuses in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang.
The United States has the Bill of Rights protecting free speech. Patent laws and business acumen saw the rise of the devices we are using to post here and the infrastructure undergirding it. However, the US Empire has consistently for 100 years invaded and bullied nations across the world from Iran (1953 overthrow of the government) to Venezuela.
Without capitalism and democracy I would not have a life way more comfortable than my ancestors. Without Chinese labour I would not have this smartphone.
Personally, I tend to veer more towards anarchism and libertarianism. Billionaires, big corporations and big governments are not to be trusted.
maybe, you would've been an spd-member in germany (1918 - 1933). (also maybe we should adopt some a.a.-formalities before commenting, like: 'hi, i'm martin and my pov's are the result of a lifetime under very anti-communist capitalist rule').
the peasants of russia and china tried and were far more successfull than anything that emerged from the industrialized west. the best way to criticize them is doing socialism/communism better. the western wannabe communists had plenty of time, but the ruling class seemed smarter up to the point that they don't have to pay anyone to criticize comrades all over the world.
"I suggest avoiding blanket generalizations and defining terms. I suggest not taking sides. In doing so we betray the truth"
That's *precisely* why I respect democracy as the way to run a government, not ideology. Marxism is NOT about democracy, it is a stealth religion parading as democracy.
I believe hybrid capitalist-socialist systems, (truly) democratically run, forever tweaked, are the way to go. Two hundred plus years of history of actual implementations of all kinds of systems has taught us at least that.
Who gives a damn that you are closer to being a Communist than ever in your life? Trotskyite fool
Having read Simon Sebag Montefiore's books about Stalin, I don't think Stalin's cruelty and crimes were because of communism, but because of flaws in his own personality. Stalin had a rotten upbringing with an abusive mother. History might have turned out very differently if not for that. He was extremely intelligent, but had strong streaks of antisocial personality disorders.
One day someone will make the same excuses for Trump. Not everyone with neglectful or abusive parents ends up behaving like a psychopath. We all have choices.
reading montefiore's wikipedia-page, some prejudice on his writing seems to be somewhat justifiable.
It is as though any leader of the dominant party in revolutionary Russia claiming a Soviet Union of larger land mass than any nation state for centuries preceding it and languages and values systems that when merged under an alien ideology so ripe for feudal monarchical corruption and nepotism any such leader of such a wide variety of cultures that could arise could protect themselves while rebuilding systems the Soviets had thoroughly and ideologically trashed as regressive! Not to mention most of the land mass being at arctic latitudes!
Careful examination of such multi-cultural consolidation into our modern concept of procedural liberal or neo-liberal societies in hostile climates will find few well-adjusted leaders attaining a critical mass of supporters to keep such an international venture from eating itself or being sectioned off from more stable royal orders or heavenly disciples of absolute 'psychopathic' if revolutionary\predatory leaders that manage the trick of Cult of Personality.
Much more study is needed of the role of industrial scale advertising and Public Relations in stabilizing such forcibly and militarily consolidated lands, peoples and tongues at a finer level of attention and study than the U.S. school systems have ever attempted.
That will be required to understand the transition of the vast British Empire into the English language dominant yet relatively stable system of internal and institutional checks & balances that allowed for both the personal freedoms (except for those of inferior gender, skin color, tribal tongue and systems of math, navigation, social and environmental balance in maintenance of settled lands) and institutional cohesion necessary to attain our own highly wealth and opportunity stratified far from perfect national project. Replete with Predatory Economics as were practiced by the British Monarchs.
We also have some more benign 'head cases' who have risen through the ranks of our filtered systems of electoral majorities into ranks that nearly matched those of absolute power and privilege seen by our own chain of colonial rule. Mass media as we all have experienced is no guarantor or safe-guard of the "Public Interest" where auto-pillage is the only setting that has ever ruled over our auctioned off most powerful means of mass communication as was developed in the past centuries of the spread of the old Anglo Social orders into a New World of intercontinental Private Wealth holdings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aK4OztueuE&t=586s
"From an Economics without Capitalism to Markets without Capitalism | DiEM25"
Yanis Varoufakis
"697,413 views Jan 26, 2021"
A lecture organised by University of Tübingen economics students, delivered on Monday February 3, 2020, on the theme "From an Economics without Capitalism to Markets without Capitalism". With lively lecture hall Q&A in English despite this being a German University!
"Mainstream economic models lack some important features of really-existing capitalism, including money, time and space. Its models offer ideological cover for a capitalist system that has usurped competitive, free markets."
"The result? Unbearable inequality, climate catastrophe and permanent stagnation. A fork on the road is approaching: It will take us either into deeper stagnation and environmental degradation or to a society with markets but no capitalism. Prof. Yanis Varoufakis talks about the future of our economy and the current state of economics with special regard to pluralism in economics."
We haven't even begun following the money from Swiss banks and Caribbean Islands High Finance Electronic HQ store-houses of raw wealth and portable accounting. Or of the Military Industrial Complex infrastructure and early stages of that international order of 'development' and Global Trade. Bring your most reliable erase-able writing implements and recording devices. Rough weather and the paradoxes of any genuine search for truths that can hold water and remain afloat and then construct healthful and affordable infrastructure without Top Down Psychopathology Transference may be expected.
Tio Mitchito
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of A-tone-ment Seekers)
Media Discussion List\Looksee
"[T]here is only one party worth joining, and that is the party of truth."
You talk about humility, yet you do not acknowledge that there is no such thing as (accessible) truth. ALL is perception, thought, communication, that is, human-centric things -- and thus ALL is eternally subject to reconsideration and revision.
It's in the very nature of human beings, who are universally and eternally limited and imperfect. All of this differs from person to person, and society to society. Accordingly, there never can or will be any static, complete Grand Unified Theory -- of anything.
Thank you for a disclosure we are sorely lacking in all of our Thought Control-devised and advertiser-sponsored broadcasting and even wireless communications Systems of Mass Distraction here in the 'developed and capitalized world.'
Tio Mitchito
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of A-tone-ment Seekers)
Media Discussion List\Looksee
It's clear to me that Marxists (and libertarians, for that matter) simply cannot see the forest for the trees.
The biggest problem with human collectives of any ideological stripe is our inability to control psychopathy. That is, to successfully identify and contain people who do NOT care about other people, from those who do, and those in between for whatever reasons.
Until that happens, it does not matter if Marx was correct about anything economic, positively or normatively. Until that happens, we will continue to see the very parade of antidemocratic monsters acting *in Marx's name* -- the ones you openly acknowledge! -- destroying societies with far more tears than capitalism every produced.
Get real, or we'll just keep repeating a hell, no matter what it is, or what it is called.
It helps when you don't have a system that selects for psychopathy, which capitalism does. It incentives people who will ruthlessly advance the demands of private capital.
If you think Marxists have caused far more tears, you've been living in a bubble.
Look, there is no system that "selects" for psychopathy, consciously or not.
The objective of an intelligent psychopath is to learn the system they swim in, and game it, as far they can up the ladder. It's a variant of the iron law of oligarchy, and a consequence of the (actual) range of human nature. Thus this happens in EVERY system. And it will keep happening until a system is *consciously* designed to control it, before the fact.
If you think any of the systems that have called themselves Marxist have escaped this, you're certainly deluded.
Capitalism literally selects for psychopaths, it requires people who are willing and able to serve the narrow and anti-social interest of capital (a ruthless abstraction with no moral obligation) over human beings. Militarism often does a similar thing, promoting the most effective killers. The two make good friends.
Whatever you want to say about power, corruption, etc etc inherent in all systems, you have to acknowledge that the very least one can hope for is a system that isn't looking to actively promote people with no conscience or empathy and strong ambition because they embody the values of the system and keep it running. That is what we have.
"Modern governments literally select for psychopaths, as they require people who are willing and able to serve the narrow and anti-social of power over human beings."
FIFY
How you're able to institute a Marxist system that -- for the first time in history, for ANY system, Marxist or not, over a large population -- is able to bypass the psychopaths is beyond me.
Power is going to exist, and corruption is always a danger. Should it be organized around serving the needs of the people, or the accumulation of an abstract thing that doesn't care about people? That's all this is, the shape of the incentive structure, not whether power exists or not, or if it can or is abused. Better to have an incentive structure that isn't inherently poisonous as a start, your odds of sick people is lower.
Been a commie most of my life. It’s a tough journey at times but the tools of analysis that bring broad theory and practical everyday knowledge to life are very useful. Like any science doubt is a valuable friend. ✊🏼
"A thoughtful atheist, living in good conscience, himself does not understand how close he is to God. This is because he performs good deeds with no thought of reward, in contrast to religious hypocrites."
- Hans Christian Andersen
Same as in Christianity -
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
Except you don't need imaginary friends to realize this.
For me, the worst part about religion is that it "monopolizes" the Good (no pun intended), claiming that only religious man can be a good and moral man..
the variation that scares them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgfY-0zcKLo
The Golden Rule is very far from unique to Christianity and is older than Christianity.
But I am.
Are you?
Caitlin, you are one brave lady. My thoughts exactly. For more good analysis see Prof. Richard Wolff, Marxist economist at R.D. Wolff.com and Democracy at Work.info.
Professor Wolff absolutely rocks!
The Best of Prof. Wolff:
youtube.com/watch?v=Hw4QXLrrIXQ
Political maturity has to do with the fact the West only constitutes 12 % of the world population. The dominance we have held economically and militarily is gone and Western ruling classes are terrified of the fact they are going to be in a minority position. It is time to quit fighting wars and accept the fact we have to partner with the rest of the world. The age of empires is over and we have to adopt whole new strategies. We have to see the world as it is not through eyes of BS propagandists and half-baked demagogues who refuse accept that we must live in a state of constant progressive adaptation. How we govern ourselves is more important than ever. Political systems have to be purged of corruption and incompetence.
Wonder why the pillar of Capitalism, USA, is trying to prevent the competition at global scale at all costs (incl. WW3), Clinging to its global hegemony by all means?
***
"Competition is a sin"
- J.D. Rockefeller
It's about administration, not governance.
The problem is figuring out how to organise your society in such a way as to prevent the accumulation of excessive power in individuals, cliques and social classes. Marxism has provided useful theoretical and practical frameworks, but this fundamental problem has not been solved. Humans evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in small groups—nomadic hunter-gatherers. When we shifted to sedentary agricultural societies, the exploitation started. So keeping the scale small as much as possible is one of the keys, imho. But we still need to solve the issue of large-scale projects and how to prevent them from being hijacked by psychopaths.
Read the World Socialist Web Site. Support the Socialist Equality Party.
A larger society has a survival advantage in the competition with other societies for resources.
A society cannot easily grow larger than Dunbar's Number without also adopting some form of money, politics, and government (so anarchism is sterile). This is why the smaller scale works better.
But we defined money to represent debt and added interest, and that definition promotes and enables society to try to break Laws of Nature that can't BE broken, so society breaks everything else instead. It grows like a Cancer, uncontrolled, until it kills its host. Those definitions create and increase inequality. They underpin Capitalism. They give advantages to psychopaths.
If the definitions (of ownership and money) are fixed, we can do it. Marx understood the problems better than most, but sought to eliminate ownership rather than just its profits.
well, industrialization, highly organised labor and technological advances seemed miraculously promising. looking back it might look like having your cake and eating it.
As long as there was a surplus of environment available to exploit, it was a winning strategy. A wrong and immoral strategy, but it made the GDP grow fast, and that is what won wars.
As soon as we perceived the limitations, we knew we had to stop, but the owning class (the psychopaths) had already been put in power. They must be removed, or starved, just as any cancer must be removed, for the patient to survive.
I support this. Their structural critique has always been correct, which is probably why it’s so taboo, while facile and useless liberalism, constantly try to soften and accommodate around the edges of the status quo, is a constant letdown. And the desperate cope of "free market" fundamentalists who think they can save capitalism by letting it run wild is so frustratingly sad.
There are particular communists, and brands of communism that I really dislike. Especially those that don’t like art and music, what they see as bourgeoisie vices, and think human liberation is a one-size fits all of everyone miserable slaving out in the fields. Or those who think that inner experience, spirituality, and consciousness are empty diversions from material struggle.
But the thing that I like is that none of those identity-larping guys can own the core issue of removing control of society from private capital and a capitalist class, and giving it to regular human beings and their priorities. It’s obvious that this is the only way humanity survives. Unless we can fully take power back, our system is like a fast car with no brakes on a winding mountain road.
We can choose our values for a post-capitalist future, that need not be austere and harsh, but humane, creative, and empowering people to be the best version of themselves and do what the things they were meant to do. In fact, as capitalism hits the inevitable contraction phase, the only way to preserve freedom, quality of life, and human potential is to de-throne capital.
Correct has nothing to do with it. This is a question of power. Nothing more.
...power...made supreme by WEALTH.
"Political Maturity Is Realizing The Commies Were Correct".
Bravo! Caitlin & Tim, you are brilliant! The best you have written. The world needs communism as never before. Did the average person stop to think ever why it was the communists who were slaughtered every time the empires old and new went on a rampage.
Growing up I imbibed communism listening wide-eyed to my big brother ( already noted as a public intellectual) and his likeminded friends. I wouldn't say I was brainwashed but they opened my eyes.
As my favourite anarchist, Emma Goldman, said, communism is a step in the right direction, but it isn't the whole answer. Try reading some Enrico Malatesta, George Woodcock, Proudon, Kropotkin, Paul Goodman. Anarchy is not chaos as those who dictate what is "right" to us would have us believe. Anarchy reverses the pyramid so that we, the people are at the top and the shitcans are at the bottom.
The problem is Anarchism is a total dead end, achieves nothing and ends up preserving capitalist status quote. It's been a diversion since the 60s.
Oh. And when have you had the experience of living in an Anarchist State? So far, anarchism is an ideology. I would like to see it be more.
I don't think it can be more. It fills a radical niche in Western societies precisely because it is inert and doesn't threaten the system. I've seen so much totally ineffective activism in the US and Pacific Northwest based around anarchist ideology. Was down at the Occupy encampments. Nothing was accomplished.
The logic should be clear: To challenge organized power, you need organized power. Leaderless ad hoc collections of individuals doing whatever they want does not challenge power.
Anarchism isn’t necessarily leaderless. That’s kind of a myth. In fact, I think your view of anarchism is based mostly on mythologies. We have seen glimpses of how anarchism works when we look at the caucus system; anarchism well done would be the type of democracy we can only dream of.
I don’t think anarchism is about not having leaders at all. It is ensuring there isn’t centralization of power. There’s enough rotation of it. Because any level of organization of power needs intact for too long is too much decisional autonomy in a single hands or a few hands — which really isn’t a betterment in the condition of political freedom, even though it might better the material conditions.
Unfortunately leaders can be eliminated which causes whatever movement the leaders were leading to fall apart. JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X immediately come to mind. As well as the many lesser known leaders who were murdered by TPTB from Walter Reuther to Patrice Lumumbu to Fred Hampton to Dag Hammerskold and on and on.
Anyone who gains any traction as a threat to the system gets whacked. If we could be like ants or bees and be able to do what needs doing without being led (the queen doesn’t lead, she just lays eggs and when she starts lagging the workers kill her and create a new queen) we’d have a chance.
Unfortunately humans don’t operate that way. I really don’t see a way out.
I don't think you really understand anarchism. It is not leaderless and it is not un-organized. In fact, an anarchic group has to be super organized. Of course, like with anything, there are probably less organized anarchists, but that is not what anarchism is about at all.
Look up Mondragon in Spain, successful for 80 years. the libertarian socialist movement of consumer and worker’s coops, which is independent of the state and democratically anarchist, have one billion members.
Anarchism might be the essence of communism, but how do you suddenly dissolve the state and the Epstein lovingly class hands over its property for building socialism? So sorry, thats nice, but we need to appreciate the realism of the concept of " the dictatorship of the proletariat " where the Epstein class is forcibly removed from power and expropriated, as it most likely will have to be. To think that something like a liberation army can be replaced by idealist anarchist philosophy, for all its value, the conditions for realising any compassionate philosophy or social welfare state has historically had to be, and will have to be, wrested from the dripping claws of the beast of property. As Caitlin suggests, the understanding and exposure of capitalism and its Epstein classes was most clearly and extensively laid out by the herculean labors of Karl Marx who, like Leonard Finkelstein and Franscesca Albanese, called out the servants of the beast in his day, and intuited the possibilities of a future state of real freedom from the wage slavery and financial fraud of the Beast and its billionaire and wannabe billionaire devotees. They are the dead end of the capitalist era trying to violently preserve the illusion of being the way to the future while they sense they are really more like garbage in the way. The best tool for growth of insight and class war remains the traditions founded on Marx and tested under intense capitalist fire in the soviet union which, in spite of all the mercenary armies thrown at it by the Epstein cabals of the day grew by socialist planning to be the frontrunner in the space race and the second most powerful bloc in the world. This is not even to mention what China has achieved with its huge communist party, in spite of all the mistakes and misrepresentations shoved down the public throat by the politicians of the beast when they take a break from raping underage girls, while prioritizing the urgent liberalisation of the age of consent to reflect misogynist partriarchal practises. So we need to achieve anarchism through the scaffolding of the democratic workers state, however that comes to be conceived in terms of the current situation and conditions. Some causes really are worth living and dying for. Imagine what an international legion of well armed and trained communists could have done to prevent Netanyahus orgy of matricide, infanticide and genocide in Palestine?
So i read Marx and the Marxists with love and gratitude, not for the form but the content, which is true human liberation from the false and vicious consciousness of the bourgeoisie by which it continues to be held captive.
May we meet one day in the enlightened anarchy of fulfilled human beings in the global commune where socialism has made the state a history as ancient as the unexpected and violent slaughter, in the early twenty first century, of the entire Epstein class of oligarchs, by forces largely unknown, and its farcical figurehead, intended as an insult to the working class, occupying the highest office of the country, whose body parts had to be pressure hosed from every nook and cranny of the oval office.
i think anarchism is kinda valuable, but rather defenseless and underestimating the ruling class. it won't and didn't do the trick, imo.
Anarchism is about reversing the pyramid, putting people in power leaving those who presently control everything at the bottom. If it were possible, people would have to become very organized and discuss how to defend themselves. Anarchists that I have met certainly do not underestimate the ruling class. I don't know where you get your information, but some reading might help. Enrico Malatesta, Kropotkin, George Woodcock has a book of essays, so does Paul Goodman.
i occasionally read things on https://www.marxists.org/english.htm. i did some malatesta and kropotkin there. there also seems to be some info on declassified cia-files where anarchists and anarchism are viewed as 'the compatible left'. their opposition to and criticism of any 'state', would make them useful especially as a leftist take down of any existing alternative outside empire (seems to be true today: anarchist critique of venezuela, cuba, china, north-korea, ...). 'unorganised' anarchist were sometimes used to disrupt communist organisation.
re: underestimating empire (and some communist /anarchist beef) -> spain 1936-1939.
Well, whaddaya know? An endorsement from Caitlin Johnstone! I'll take it! Thank you very much!
Seriously, it took me a long time to admit those annoying commies who seemed to actively enjoy giving me cognitive dissonance were right about how capitalism works and how it treats people as commodities, without which you can't have colonialism. No colonialism, no Israel...
That's why communists and anarchists alike are not surprised that Epstein could happen.
"No colonialism, no Israel." No UK, no EU either, no US of A nor all the Western colonial nor Corporate-Captured holdings like Canada and those claimed by other Euro prettied up Social Democratic Utopias. Mind you I've become persuaded of Social Democratic values in theory and in rejecting our U.S. Colonial 2 Sides of Royal to Wall Street minted Paper Currency & CoinAge (Pennies have now been priced out of our colonial continuance system. More devaluation and dissolution of Public Interest to follow...)
However, my access to weapons of Mass Destruction are rather limited and our failing 'electoral' empire's methods of persuasion maintain true financial rule from Wall Street and the Lords of Documented Wealth and Military Enforcement.
I don't see much accounting of True Costs except for a few non-broadcast-able first-rate thinkers such as these willing to confront the internal contradictions and paradoxes of theoretical and doomed to failure E-CON models:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iRc3ZkHzRU
"Who Owns Your Image and Narrative?" Naomi Klein & Yanis Varoufakis — Live
DiEM25
238K subscribers
Tio Mitchito
Social Democratic values are colonial values because the prosperity they wish to build is built by exploiting people in other countries.
Please explain to me whether the Iroquois Confederacy counts as historical colonial entity and if not, why?
Caitlin sounds like she's been hijacked or willingly succumbed or business modeled into AI....
Tio Mitchito
TM
The Iroquois Confederacy was an indigenous alliance which was certainly influenced by the colonists, but it was definitely an indigenous organization which in fact influenced the United States Constitution.
No, I would not consider the Iroquois Confederacy as a historical colonial entity. Quite the reverse. It was an indigenous political entity strong enough to resist colonial domination for at least a century.
I'd say they did pretty good.
The Mohawk and others within the regionally expanding Iroquois Confederacy engaged in genocidal campaigns v. other tribes. See the Creek Confederacy and relocation of Iroquois Confederacy southeastern tribes within the Confederacy.
Tio Mitchito
The root of the adjective or Pronoun "Colonial" is shared by the verb to "Colonize."
Every Indigenous presence in what came to be called Turtle Island or North America or any human settled colony colonized their home land and defended that turf from other colonizers. Tribal, national or regional. Which came first conquest, exile or settling the Home Land?
I intend these to be unsettling questions of inquiry shared into how we conceive language and maintain a sense of time (a human concept and\or limitation physically settled if not faithfully or uniformly accepted and\or resolved among our species). I do not intend this disquisition as a challenge to any superior's sense of order or mutually, much less universally acceptable human arrangement.
Curiously yours,
Tio Mitchito
Mitch Ritter
Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of A-tone-ment Seekers)
Media Discussion List\Looksee
the most social democratic nation is NOrway: their wealth is built on offshore oil, not exploiting people. They are using the wealth from the oil to build a society that will be prosperous, free, and happy when the oil runs out. Between state capitalism and private capitalism is the 3d way of democratic socialism, which takes the best of both systeems in a hybrid that has created in Northern Europe the most prosperous, free, and happy people on earth.
If I hadn’t realized how wise you are before, and subscribed as a result, I would know it now, after reading these cold, hard truths.
We do not have "free markets." Read Robert Reich....astute understanding of the wealth/poverty divide. Poverty is A POLICY CHOICE. The system is RIGGED. It has always been rigged. Wish you were here, George Carlin, RIP...
And you never will. There is no such thing as a free market.
"Capitalism" is not the same thing as "free markets". Capitalism is Rockefeller economics, where corporations and politicians work together to monopolize and destroy competition ("crony capitalism" or "corporatism"). Communism is Satan's apostate and evil version of the Law of Consecration, where agency is removed. Conflating "capitalism" with "free markets" is a slight of hand to justify communism. The "fascism" of the right, and the "communism" of the left is the greatest trick of all, where both outcomes lead to the same thing - total government control and the total removal of economic agency. #two-partyillusion
Free markets are not a real thing. They've never existed, and never will, because they posit an economic playing field that isn't shaped by money or power!
Those born to wealth will not voluntarily accept risk. Hence, Military Industrial E-CON-O-mies. Risk of one's family wealth in so-called Free Markets are not acceptable to those Born to the Breed. Wall Street investor miracle tales have much of the risk removed or not wagered or even government-controlled by the down-wardly mobile Public Servants who were born on 3rd Base (as we Yanks say in our quaint Brit-adapted game of colonial baseball..)
Here is how "Systemic Correction" is handled in U.S. serial High Finance Collapse Bail Outs of my well spent mostly 20th Century yoot and now 21st Century Wage Stag Nation slavery. Keep a pen and notebook handy to imprint upon you. Electronic devices don't imprint neurologically like hand-writing your own notes and periodically consulting and up-dating...This documentary is appropriately titled: INSIDE JOB as no U.S. Regulatory System has come close to correcting these remarkably punctual Public Interest Bail Outs of Hoarded Private Capital:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2IaJwkqgPk&t=1266s
"2,435,879 views"
Dec 20, 2020
"Inside Job is a 2010 American documentary film, directed by Charles Ferguson, about the late 2000s financial crisis.
"The global financial meltdown that took place in Fall of 2008 caused millions of job and home losses and plunged the United States into a deep economic recession.
"This documentary provides a detailed examination of the elements that led to the collapse and identifies key financial and political players.
"Director Charles Ferguson conducts a wide range of interviews and traces the story from the United States to China to Iceland to several other global financial hot spots.
"Ferguson, who began researching in 2008, says the film is about "the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption". In five parts, the film explores how changes in the policy, environment and banking practices helped create the financial crisis."
Via
Tio Mitchito
Mitch Ritter\11 year highly commended Executive Office Case Worker for Wells Fargo Card Services Written and Filed Complaints audited by the flaccid U.S. Regulatory so-called Consumer Protection Agencies the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and U.S. (White Collar) Justice System.
There is such a thing as hybrids...it's a continuum, not necessarily the stark extremes at either end. Richard Wolff explains that China has a hybrid ECONOMIC system...private and public ownership. The political system is authoritarian - like ours IS NOW. I continually hear people conflating the two....economic and political.
Pretending China's authoritarian one-party rule is the same as the American system is peak idiocy.
Gee...thanks for the mansplainin'.....obviously in need?!
From your previous comment, it seems you were stating that the American political system is authoritarian, just like China's. Is that assumption wrong?
It was not. Now IT IS. A full on infestation...Nazi occupation...."idiot," huh? I'm an "idiot"? Mansplain' elsewhere.
I am quite capable of big girl research...all by myself.
No.
The american political system doesn't just become authoritarian because you dislike the occupant of the White House.
It's sad that I have to "mansplain" basic politics to you, but you were obviously "in need".
Read Lenin. That is my advice to you.
Agree. Reading Lenin will help everyone see the poisonous idiocy of communism.
Wonder why the pillar of Capitalism, USA, is trying to prevent the competition at global scale at all costs (incl. WW3), Clinging to its global hegemony by all means?
***
"Competition is a sin"
- J.D. Rockefeller
***
"Vertical" and "Horizontal" Integration by J.D. Rockefeller:
youtu.be/d__pH5Wt3Ms?t=184
***
Palantir's Peter Thiel: "Competition is for losers":
youtube.com/watch?v=4jniPAD2uoo
So-called "Free market" capitalism ended after WW1:
youtu.be/7f_V9zZNzTY?t=264
***
"NAFTA and GATT(WTO) have about as much to do with free trade as the Patriot Act has to do with liberty."
-Michael Badnarik
If you follow the line of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, are you a socialist or a communist or both? For that matter, if you are a Marxist, same question. I am still not clear on this even after studying some Marx/Engels/Lenin/Trotsky and reading hundreds of contemporary articles.
Anyway -- of course Marx was totally right. The more you observe, the more clear it is. What is really striking is the tremendous effectiveness of capitalist indoctrination. I know plenty of people who are educated and intelligent, and still believe the shit they read in the New York Times.
People have said to me they don't care for the World Socialist Webste (https://wsws.org) because it's too "ideological". Didn't Marx say the predominant ideology is the ruling class ideology? The NY Times is drenched in capitalist ideology, but these well-educated people never notice that.
Thank you. I have been a supporter of the WSWS and the SEP for more than 25 years.
You're a supporter with all the money you took from capitalists 🤣
Boomer libs can't die fast enough
I have been a steadfast supporter since 2012. I remember walking into an public SEP meeting for the first time, in New York City, and immediately being deeply impressed. Though still relatively naïve (relative to myself today), I knew I was in a room with people whose political clarity and understanding was way beyond anything I'd ever encountered. Which is another way of restating Caitlin's point: we commies are right.
Intelligent people know socialism has failed in every instance. Get a job
how richly ironic. your comment with its gratuitous snark bespeaks profound ignorance.
No, it's basic reality that you morons insist on ignoring to pursue your utopian fantasy.
Come now, debate the issues rather than attacking the person. Make your argument like a grownup, and then we can talk
I marched your tone. Nothing else.
Here's the argument. Name me one example of socialism that has worked in practice. Actual socialism, meaning the collective ownership of the means of production.
Go.
Very well. We'll start with your first assertion -- that you "matched [my] tone. Nothing else." That's demonstrably false. See above. I said your comment bespoke profound ignorance. To suggest someone is ignorant may be unflattering, but "ignorant" is objective and nonjudgmental rather than abusive. I, for example, am utterly ignorant about electrical engineering. To say "David is ignorant of electrical engoineering" would not be an insult. You, by contrast, stated above that those who are intelligent agree with your view of socialism and those who do not are "morons." Do you understand the difference?
Now you ask -- rhetorically, perhaps -- if I can cite an example of socialism that has "worked," with collective ownership of the means of production. I would say: no, not yet, but the fact that the struggle for socialism and against capitalism has yet to succeed is probative of nothing. How many centuries did it take for human society to go from slavocracy and feudalism to bourgeois democracy? Quite a few. We also have yet to develop a cure for Parkinson's disease. Shall we conclude that a cure is impossible and that we should give up? (That was a rhetorical question.)
Socialism is a rational, historically grounded and future-oriented way of thinking based on an objective assessment of reality. Broadly speaking, we can define socialism as a democratic system of economic and social organization that prioritizes social need rather than private profit. It has to be global, not isolated in a single nation-state. It is to be distinguished from Stalinism, Maoism, North Korea, and so forth. Authoritarianism and corruption are on a different axis from socialism versus capitalism.
Now consider capitalism. Its invariable result is inequality, repression, environmental destruction and imperialist war. This is not to say there was not inequality and violence in pre-capitalist societies. I am saying that with capitalism, inequality and social misery are not a bug but a feature. Exploitation and extraction are how it works; war among competing imperial powers is its inexorable conseqence. Marxist theory has been borne out time and again. Under global capitalism, humanity is on a collision course with catastrophe. Increasingly, people understand this -- especially the younger generations. Socialism is a dirty word to those who are still thoroughly indoctrinated in capitalist ideology -- the prevailing ideology of the ruling classes. If there is to be human civilization a hundred years from now, it will be socialist because it cannot be otherwise.
Wow... So glad to know that others realize now that the Reds all along had it right! (Correct, I mean.) How can any system that functions under the premise that "only the strong will survive and prosper" and sees all the rest of us lowly workers as "consumers" or cattle ever bring about peace and harmony on this planet? (Answer, it can't function--it's inherently dysfunctional.)
Power to the people--not the war profiteers!
Thank you. You make some excellent points in your writing.! Especially about communists. We have been indoctrinated in greed and consumerism.