Moving Toward Communism

[phk]

Editor’s Note: The following is the concluding excerpt from the edited text of a recent talk by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA. This talk was given to a group of supporters of the RCP who are studying the historical experience of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and preparing to take up the challenge of popularizing this experience and engaging in discussion and debate with others about it, particularly on campuses but also more broadly.

The entire talk is online at rwor.org. Footnotes and subheads have been added to this excerpt.

One of the things that was pointed out in the last great battle in China, when the forces who were following Mao were criticizing the revisionists in the Chinese Communist Party who were poised to take over and take China back down the road to capitalism—one of the points that the Maoists made was that the power over the relations and means of production in socialist society is in significant ways concentrated as the power of political leadership.

Now this is a very important point, and a very acute contradiction as well. What were they talking about? Well, this can be concentrated in the statement that I’ve made in a number of writings and talks, that when we say that the masses of people are the masters of socialist society, we’re not just talking bullsh**t—that’s actually true and it has many different expressions and manifestations—but the point I have emphasized is that this is true not in some absolute sense, but only in a relative sense, and it’s something that’s not static, but is in motion.

Now, what do I mean by that—a relative sense and not an absolute sense, and not static but in motion? This means that so long as society is on the socialist road, is carrying out the transition toward communism that Marx talked about, toward the abolition or transformation of the four alls—as long as that is the case, this will find expression in the masses of people being more and more drawn into all these different spheres of society, and having more and more of a role in these things. It’s impossible to continue advancing on that road without that. If you don’t do that, and you try to rely on a handful, you will inevitably be forced back into the bourgeois way of doing things. Even on the level of the economy, you will be forced to calculate according to the principle of profit in command in the economy, with commodity relations dominating the economy. Because if you don’t build, and transform, the economy by unleashing the conscious initiative and activism of the masses to actually determine what should be produced and in what proportions and all these other things, then you have to fall back on some other mechanism for doing that, or the whole thing will come unraveled. And the only mechanism you could fall back on is the capitalist mechanism of calculating according to production for profit, and letting commodity production determine the direction of things.

So, in order to even advance on the socialist road, you have to consciously strive to do things in a different way, by bringing into play the conscious initiative of the masses of people. Even on the level of the economy, how could you possibly calculate what should be produced in what proportion and how it should be exchanged if you don’t involve the masses of people in that? Unless you are going to fall back on capitalist principles, how could you possibly do that, other than by relying on and increasingly involving the masses and their conscious initiative?

How could you evaluate what’s produced, and whether it’s really useful to the masses of people, if you don’t rely on them? The capitalists say you can’t do this—you have to rely on the market mechanism, that’s the only way. Well, it is the only way to have an exploiting system at this stage of history. But if you want to have something different, which abolishes exploitation, then you have to rely on the masses.

But this isn’t some absolute thing. You just don’t have mass meetings to decide everything; and, as I have talked about from a lot of different angles, you don’t have masses who are absolutely equal in every way. In many ways, especially in the early stages of socialism, there are profound inequalities among these masses. And this ends up getting expressed in the fact that some people have more of a role in political affairs, and in the affairs of society in general, than others. These people, if they are adhering to the socialist road, if they are really applying the communist outlook and methodology, will act in the interests of the masses, but in significant ways they are acting in place of the masses even while acting in their interests. To move beyond that situation requires a whole process, a whole epoch of struggle, to achieve the transition from socialism to communism, and not just in one country by itself—which is impossible—but on a worldwide basis.

So this is what I’m talking about when I am speaking to the fact that the masses are the masters of socialist society but in a relative sense, not in some absolute sense. There are all these contradictions running all through that. And there are no easy answers. There is one road or another to deal with these problems, these contradictions—either the socialist road, or the road back to capitalism.
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF HAVING AN ARMY

Forging ahead on the correct road, the socialist road, is a very complex and wrenching process, and you can get pulled off it in a thousand ways. And only by consciously continuing to go back to the communist outlook and methodology and applying this in a consistent way—that’s the only way you can stay on the socialist road.

And then you have a tremendous fight, because you are not doing this in a vacuum. You’ve got counter- revolutionaries, who don’t want those inequalities overturned and uprooted, and you’ve got people who want to go so far and no further. "I liked it when we were eliminating some of these evils of society, but now you are starting to get close to where I live. So that’s enough now, okay? Things have improved enough." That happens, and people turn from one thing into another. Not just leaders, but people in society generally. But this happens in a concentrated way with some leaders. As Engels said, the revolution advances through stages, and even well-intentioned people get stuck at certain stages. They can’t figure out how to go forward. What do you do about the fact that the imperialists are breathing down your neck? Well, that’s not an easy problem to solve.

And one of the main ways in which all of these contradictions, and in particular these two great contradictions— that socialism is a transition to communism, and not yet communism, that it has all these inequalities that still have to be overcome; and, at the same time, that you are surrounded by imperialists—a major way in which these two contradictions get bound up together, and concentrated, is in the need for an army in socialist society.

Now, a lot of anarchists, and some others, talk about how you shouldn’t have a state. Well, they are not serious. Or they are serious, but they are serious about something else than actually revolutionizing society. They also don’t get beyond "the narrow horizon of bourgeois right." The kind of society they are envisioning is not one in which these profound inequalities could actually be transformed and eliminated. Because without a state, how are you going to actually implement policies that move in the direction of overcoming these inequalities? What if the people who don’t like uprooting these inequalities, who benefit from them, resist these changes? Then what do you do? Without a state, what do you do? "Well, okay, if you don’t want to do it, I guess we won’t do it." [laughter] That’s all you could be left with. So they are not really going for the all-around transformation of society.

[phk]

Plus, in the real world, as they say, you would be crushed in a minute. You don’t have a state? You don’t have means to suppress those who want to overthrow your revolution? You don’t have an army to protect your revolution? Forget it. There’s been plenty of experience where people have been drowned in blood, and where the attempts of people rising up have been met with just horrendous suppression, because they didn’t have the material force to meet the material force of the oppressors. And the idea that you would go through everything that is necessary in order to make a revolution, and then turn around and hand it back to the oppressors, the exploiters—to me that’s just unfathomable, and unforgivable. You don’t resolve the problems that you are trying to resolve by not defending your revolution, or by not having an army that can defend it.

But there are problems in having an army. We have to face them squarely. Why do you need an army? Okay, you’ve got the imperialists out there, and you’ve got other counter-revolutionaries, right within socialist society—that’s easy to see. But why couldn’t you just arm the population in general and deal with that? Well, there is a very real problem, there are very real reasons why you can’t do that. The imperialists devote a tremendous amount of resources and people to developing their military strategy, their military doctrines, and their concrete technology and people to wield these things. And they spend a tremendous amount of time training their military. Right now they have been training for a couple of decades to do urban combat. We’ll see what happens if they actually have to engage in that kind of combat in a really serious way, especially against a massive force of aroused and conscious revolutionary people, determined to fight in a revolutionary way for their emancipation and the emancipation of society, and the whole world ultimately. But they will probably prevail, in the short term sense militarily, against various insurgent forces which do not really rely on and fully mobilize the masses of people, women as well as men, to fight for real emancipation. That’s the most likely outcome. Why? Because these imperialists have tremendous technology, because they have developed these different means of utilizing that technology, communication and all kinds of things. And because they have trained their forces over and over again. Those people in their army are professionals. That’s what they do.

Well, if you want to overthrow the rule of the imperialists, and then defend the socialist society you are bringing into being and continue on the socialist road, you also have to have people who specialize in that particular sphere; when it comes to that, you have to have a full-time professional armed force—people who spend their time studying it, learning about what the imperialists are doing in this sphere, learning about military history in general, and military doctrine, training your military forces. You have to devote a part of your economy to producing—not the same weapons the imperialists do on the same level, because you can’t—but weapons that correspond to your way of fighting against them. You can’t just go out there with pop guns. If you are serious about defending the gains of the revolution, you are going to have to develop real weaponry to defend your revolution and the new society it has brought into being. And you are going to have to devote people to it.

Now why can’t you just have everybody do this equally? It goes back to what I was saying earlier: As long as you are in a situation—and remember you are not exploiting anybody else now, you are not ripping off the world, you are not living "at the top of the food chain" in that way any more—if you are going to produce and distribute all of the things that keep the society running and continue to improve the conditions of the people—there are horrendous conditions that have to be addressed immediately, and then other needs of people that are ongoing—so a large part of your population has to devote a large part of its time to that sphere of production in order for that to happen, they cannot also be training in military affairs on the level that is necessary in order to deal with these imperialists. They can be mobilized, part-time, to be in militias; and these militias can supplement the full-time military, but they cannot substitute for it, or play a role equal to it, at this stage of things and in the early stages of socialism.

So you have to have a division of labor in your society. Some people specialize in the military. You can rotate people through, but you are not going to obliterate all the distinctions there. At any given time, those who are in the military are a special body of armed people who are trained, highly trained, highly disciplined, highly equipped, and they are surrounded by or living in the midst of a population that is not so trained, equipped and trained in that way. Even if they are involved in militias and spending one day out of the week training in that way, for example, they are not going to be any match for the professional army in an actual military showdown. We saw that in the coup in China. I’ve talked about this before. I was listening to the radio right after the coup and they were talking about how the militias in Shanghai were fighting the PLA, which was no longer really a PLA—no longer a people’s liberation army—but had become a bourgeois army. And I kept saying "come on, militias." But they had no chance, and they were crushed. Now, maybe if they had got more momentum going earlier, they could have peeled away sections of the army and things could have gone a different way. That would have been a whole different kind of dynamic. But, just in a military contest, they had no chance. And this is a reflection of these profound underlying contradictions that we have to work our way through at the same time as we have to defend ourselves, defend the new socialist societies as we bring them into being.

[phk]

So this is another problem that we really have to grapple with deeply. These contradictions facing socialist society, which I’ve been speaking to, get concentrated in this special body of armed people.
MOVING TOWARD THE FOUR ALLS

Mao led the Chinese revolution in dealing with these contradictions in some profoundly new ways, especially as that got expressed for a decade in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—where, in contrast to all the slanders about this, they were trying and struggling to bring forward all kinds of new things in the relations among people. They were struggling to transform the culture and the ways of thinking of people in ways that corresponded to carrying out this necessary transition toward the achievement of the "four alls." In every sphere there were new things brought forward that represented further transformations along that road.

You could look at the sphere of health care, for example. Before the Cultural Revolution, the situation in China remained largely as it had before the revolution altogether, before 1949, where the great majority of the people lived in the rural areas working in agriculture, and had little if any access to health care, even basic health care. What they had developed was health care in the cities. And people who were following the revisionist line argued that they should build up the cities more, that the only way to eventually bring along the countryside was to develop the cities, even in a disproportionate way in relation to the countryside. Concentrate on developing heavy industry in the cities, improve the livelihood of the people and the health of the people there, so they could produce more, and eventually that would benefit the countryside, eventually you would be able to mechanize agriculture and other things because you had built up industry.

But Mao insisted, very correctly, that if you do it that way, you are just going to polarize the society the same way it was before, or in slightly different forms but essentially the same. And this is what has happened in China since the revisionists came to power. Especially in the cities but also to some degree in the rural areas, you have a relatively small stratum that is profiting, while the great masses of people are suffering terribly. Tens of millions of people are leaving the countryside, just like in all the rest of the Third World countries, coming to the cities, and many of them remain unemployed there, because the whole economy has been geared to a certain stratum, and the differences between the city and the countryside have been further accentuated.

Well, when China was socialist, all this is what they were going after to transform. They were on a completely different road—the socialist road—which reached its high point during the Cultural Revolution. And you could go through all the different spheres of society—education, for example. Before the Cultural Revolution, education was turning out an elite that would actually better serve a bourgeois system, and was going to reinforce the inequalities that already were there. And the same in every sphere. Take culture: Mao denounced the culture before the Cultural Revolution—he said it should be renamed the culture of beauties and emperors and so on. Because those were the only people being portrayed on the stage. All the old feudal works of art, which supposedly embodied "classical" representations of Chinese society, were being performed and were reinforcing the old ways of thinking and the old ways of being. So this is something they set out to transform.

Now, did they make errors in that? Sure. Are there things that we should learn to do better? Of course. But they also made tremendous advances. This is a society in which, until 1949, many women had their feet bent under and crushed so that they would look more "dainty." Even prostitutes had to have these bound feet in China because it was considered to be unattractive for women to have normal size feet.

I remember seeing Barbara Walters doing a program in the 1970s on shoes from around the world. And she showed a shoe from the old China, a shoe for bound feet—a very small shoe—and she said, "You can see that Chinese women needed an equal rights amendment." And then she actually added: "Well, in fact they have one ." This was back in a different time when even some things like this, some of the truth about what was happening in China, exerted an influence even on the mainstream. This was before the coup in China. But here is this shoe that embodied the plight of tens of millions of Chinese women; and, less than two decades after that, you had women performing in these revolutionary ballets doing things that had never been done before in ballet, anywhere in the world by anyone.

This was a tremendous transformation, not only in the content of these ballets—in that they were putting forward revolutionary themes and the masses of people were on the stage representing revolutionary struggle—but even in the social relations within the ballet—and these were of very high artistic quality. You can criticize that there weren’t enough of these works, and that other things were being suppressed, or not being fostered; and there is more to look into on that. But these were works of very high artistic quality. And you had women who, two generations before, would have had their feet crushed under, performing incredible feats in ballet that had never been done before.

And you can go down the list, in every part of society. I don’t have time to go into all of it here. The point is that Mao was trying to find new ways to do this. And it wasn’t just all from the top down. One of the things that Mao said at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution was: In the past we tried to find a form which would enable us to address these problems (that these inequalities were being reinforced, and the old ways of thinking were being reinforced), but we didn’t find a form and a means for the masses of people to address our dark side from below. What he meant by "our dark side" was the part of the Chinese Communist Party that was taking the revisionist road, and the policies that were embodied in that. There was not a way that they were able, before the Cultural Revolution, to bring forward, from below, mass criticism—and not just mass criticism but also mass struggle—against all these things, and therefore, he said, it didn’t go anywhere. There would be criticism from the top, they would have education movements to bring out the need to change things, but they didn’t go anywhere, because, as Mao said, before the Cultural Revolution, we never found a form in which the people could rise up and criticize us and struggle against these things, from below, and in a mass way.
THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION

The cultural revolution was precisely the form in which that became much more possible. Of course, there were all kinds of contradictions in it. But that became the form through which such mass criticism and struggle became much more possible. Even the way the Party was reconstituted after the Cultural Revolution was a reflection of that, because to a large degree it was disbanded in the swirl and chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and the mass criticism, and the way in which the Party was reconstituted was what they called "open door meetings" where Party members (or potential Party members) would go before the masses and be evaluated and criticized. So in that way, too, they were making advances and developing forms for the masses to play an increasingly conscious role in all this.

[David S]

Let me ask you the same question I've asked other communists on this forum: Where is the shining example of a successful communist nation? Where is the communist nation that has come anywhere near providing the level of prosperity, freedom and opportunity that our capitalist society provides for us? There are none!

Communism promises shared prosperity, but it only deliveries shared poverty and misery.

Freedom is also lost with communism since individual rights must be sacrificed for the common good.

Beyond that communists seem to have a nasty habit of murdering millions of their own people.

So where is the upside?

Where do you guys get the idea that communism is good?

[Cashcow]

Please throw your computer into the Pacific Ocean.

[Joe Republic]

Let me ask you the same question I've asked other communists on this forum: Where is the shining example of a successful communist nation? Where is the communist nation that has come anywhere near providing the level of prosperity, freedom and opportunity that our capitalist society provides for us? There are none!

In fairness (and I'd like to point out that I am not a communist and never will be),  there has never been a true communist country because none of the governments we've seen have actually abided by Marx's principles.  Lenin adapted the theory into Marxism-Leninism, which is really a bastardization of the original.  Anywhere else that has tried has been stunted by civil war (Russia and China) or stunted by a foreign power (Cuba, Indo-China, North Korea, Eastern Europe - which was already destroyed by 30 years of war).

Communism promises shared prosperity, but it only deliveries shared poverty and misery.

Exactly for the reasons listed above.  None of the countries have been allowed to exercize true communist philosophy, either because of external influence, internal weakness and instability, or the power of one corrupt mad dictator.  None of this is what Marx originally had in mind.

Freedom is also lost with communism since individual rights must be sacrificed for the common good.

This is true in my opinion, and is Reason #1 of about a hundred for why I'll never agree with communism.

Beyond that communists seem to have a nasty habit of murdering millions of their own people.

Also true, but again, because of the reasons listed above.

*Just showing two sides to the story, is all...*

[John Dibble]

In fairness (and I'd like to point out that I am not a communist and never will be),  there has never been a true communist country because none of the governments we've seen have actually abided by Marx's principles.  Lenin adapted the theory into Marxism-Leninism, which is really a bastardization of the original.  Anywhere else that has tried has been stunted by civil war (Russia and China) or stunted by a foreign power (Cuba, Indo-China, North Korea, Eastern Europe - which was already destroyed by 30 years of war).

Well, I don't begrudge you for trying to be objective, but I think a real question is 'can Marx's version of communism actually be implemented?' I seriously doubt it, and it would still be pretty bloody and without freedom if it could. Let's face it - Marx was an idiot.

[Joe Republic]

In fairness (and I'd like to point out that I am not a communist and never will be),  there has never been a true communist country because none of the governments we've seen have actually abided by Marx's principles.  Lenin adapted the theory into Marxism-Leninism, which is really a bastardization of the original.  Anywhere else that has tried has been stunted by civil war (Russia and China) or stunted by a foreign power (Cuba, Indo-China, North Korea, Eastern Europe - which was already destroyed by 30 years of war).

Well, I don't begrudge you for trying to be objective, but I think a real question is 'can Marx's version of communism actually be implemented?' I seriously doubt it, and it would still be pretty bloody and without freedom if it could. Let's face it - Marx was an idiot.

Taking Marx's theory literally, that remains to be seen.  The theory goes that capitalism eventually reaches its peak, and then the underprivileged underclass inevitably revolt and take over.  Every country that has so far had communist revolutions or imposed governments took place where capitalism was nowhere near its peak, and therefore there was no wealthy economy to take advantage of.  Hence why they all soon descended into economic chaos and corrupt dictatorships.

[phk]

In fairness (and I'd like to point out that I am not a communist and never will be),  there has never been a true communist country because none of the governments we've seen have actually abided by Marx's principles.  Lenin adapted the theory into Marxism-Leninism, which is really a bastardization of the original.  Anywhere else that has tried has been stunted by civil war (Russia and China) or stunted by a foreign power (Cuba, Indo-China, North Korea, Eastern Europe - which was already destroyed by 30 years of war).

Well, I don't begrudge you for trying to be objective, but I think a real question is 'can Marx's version of communism actually be implemented?' I seriously doubt it, and it would still be pretty bloody and without freedom if it could. Let's face it - Marx was an idiot.

Taking Marx's theory literally, that remains to be seen.  The theory goes that capitalism eventually reaches its peak, and then the underprivileged underclass inevitably revolt and take over.  Every country that has so far had communist revolutions or imposed governments took place where capitalism was nowhere near its peak, and therefore there was no wealthy economy to take advantage of.  Hence why they all soon descended into economic chaos and corrupt dictatorships.

I would add that the fall of communism in the USSR and the PRC, however, is rooted not in economics, but in the distinct superstructural contradiction between the particularities of the personality cult (which I oppose, due to the historical lessons of this contradiction) and the necessity of the two-line struggle (the struggle between capitalist and communist contradictory forces within both the Party and the masses) during socialism. What I mean is, the criticism of the "great leader" allows for the overthrow of socialist policies instituted under the auspices of the leader after his death by the bureaucrat capitalists. We see how this contradiction leads to revisionism first in Khrushchev's renunciation of "Stalinism" in his "secret speech" to the 20th Party Congress and then again in Deng Xiaoping's "pragmatist" renunciation of Maoism. In both cases, the explicit crticism of the subject of the personality cult contains an implicit criticism of the socialist system, giving grounds for a complete reversal of political, social, and economic policy from within the volatile dynamic of the two-line struggle. The problem is that it is practically impossible to critique the personality cult while the leader in question is alive (without being accused, perhaps correctly, of right-capitulationism), unless you are Lenin, who overturned the personality cult instituted in his name himself. And yet, when the leader is dead such criticism tends historically toward revisionism (and it should be said that while Mao's two-sided, 70-30 assessment of the correct and incorrect in Stalin was meant to combat Khrushchev's revisionism, Deng's use of the same ratio to attack "Maoism" from within the peramiters of "Mao Tse-tung Thought" is a tremendously clear example of how this contradiction functions).

For a brief moment in history over half of the world was Communist, but revisionism changed all of that, and now there are no Communist governments anywhere in the world but in the Maoist base areas of South Asia. Nepal itself is desperately needed as a revolutionary intercommunal base area. To a large extent this already exists in what the media sometimes calls the Maoist Nexus in South Asia - the "Compact Revolutionary Zone" extending from Red territories in Nepal through to the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The international policy advisory NGO, International Crisis Group, appears to be gearing up for the strong possibility of Maoist victory in Nepal, saying in their recent policy briefing, "Should the king still drag his feet, it would be time to consider more radical options, including international expressions of support for a republic rather than constitutional monarchy." This is a thinly veiled threat toward Gyanendra. The only political force in Nepal calling for a Republic instead of Panchayat are the Maoist guerrillas (cf. also the program of the United Revolutionary People's Council of the CPN (Maoist), the juridico-political body, organized according to the mass-line, at the head of the local United Revolutionary People's Committees which govern Red Nepal). Still, even the EU seems to be preparing for a Maoist victory in Nepal, according to New Kerala, also preferring, apparently, to deal with a Communist Republic over Gyanendra's fuedal-fascist military backed absolute monarcy (cf.  also "Maoism on the March?" by Gary Leupp). If the CPN (Maoist) wins the revolution the question will then turn to the problem of Indian expansionism. With a powerful, growing and newly unified Maoist movement in their own country, what will India do about a Maoist Republic in what they like to call their back yard? I look to South Asia these days with hope for the world's people.

[David S]

In fairness (and I'd like to point out that I am not a communist and never will be),  there has never been a true communist country because none of the governments we've seen have actually abided by Marx's principles.  Lenin adapted the theory into Marxism-Leninism, which is really a bastardization of the original.  Anywhere else that has tried has been stunted by civil war (Russia and China) or stunted by a foreign power (Cuba, Indo-China, North Korea, Eastern Europe - which was already destroyed by 30 years of war).

Well, I don't begrudge you for trying to be objective, but I think a real question is 'can Marx's version of communism actually be implemented?' I seriously doubt it, and it would still be pretty bloody and without freedom if it could. Let's face it - Marx was an idiot.

Taking Marx's theory literally, that remains to be seen.  The theory goes that capitalism eventually reaches its peak, and then the underprivileged underclass inevitably revolt and take over.  Every country that has so far had communist revolutions or imposed governments took place where capitalism was nowhere near its peak, and therefore there was no wealthy economy to take advantage of.  Hence why they all soon descended into economic chaos and corrupt dictatorships.

Sounds like you are saying that communism can only be successful if it can take over a successful capitalist system. Maybe I would agree with that, but I would add that such success would be short-lived. Communism will not remain successful for the same reason that it cannot become successful. It simply cannot achieve the efficiency or innovation of competitive free market capitalism.

The economic chaos you mentioned is an unavoidable outcome of communism, IMHO.

My advice to the forum communists is to stop thinking about how well communism should work and look at how miserably it actually works. Then bury that dead duck and get behind a system that really does work; free market capitalism.

[Joe Republic]

In fairness (and I'd like to point out that I am not a communist and never will be),  there has never been a true communist country because none of the governments we've seen have actually abided by Marx's principles.  Lenin adapted the theory into Marxism-Leninism, which is really a bastardization of the original.  Anywhere else that has tried has been stunted by civil war (Russia and China) or stunted by a foreign power (Cuba, Indo-China, North Korea, Eastern Europe - which was already destroyed by 30 years of war).

Well, I don't begrudge you for trying to be objective, but I think a real question is 'can Marx's version of communism actually be implemented?' I seriously doubt it, and it would still be pretty bloody and without freedom if it could. Let's face it - Marx was an idiot.

Taking Marx's theory literally, that remains to be seen.  The theory goes that capitalism eventually reaches its peak, and then the underprivileged underclass inevitably revolt and take over.  Every country that has so far had communist revolutions or imposed governments took place where capitalism was nowhere near its peak, and therefore there was no wealthy economy to take advantage of.  Hence why they all soon descended into economic chaos and corrupt dictatorships.

Sounds like you are saying that communism can only be successful if it can take over a successful capitalist system. Maybe I would agree with that, but I would add that such success would be short-lived. Communism will not remain successful for the same reason that it cannot become successful. It simply cannot achieve the efficiency or innovation of competitive free market capitalism.

The economic chaos you mentioned is an unavoidable outcome of communism, IMHO.

Exactly.  Well, that's how I see it too anyway.  I guess you could see it as capitalism builds up the economy and makes it strong, but by creating a two- or multi-tier hierarchy of wealth.  When the economy is as strong as it possibly can be, the underclass majority rise up and share the wealth.  So yeah, that's when things start collapsing again.

Marx had it as a linear theory where the little guys take control and everybody is happy, end of story.  But anybody can see that if anything, it would go in circles.

[PBrunsel]

I'll curse Herbert Hoover the day the U.S. becomes a Communist Nation.

[David S]

I'll curse Herbert Hoover the day the U.S. becomes a Communist Nation.

Can you elaborate on that one partner?

[Jake]

I'll curse Herbert Hoover the day the U.S. becomes a Communist Nation.

Can you elaborate on that one partner?

Hoover lost to FDR, FDR started socialism in America, on and on we go

[David S]

I'll curse Herbert Hoover the day the U.S. becomes a Communist Nation.

Can you elaborate on that one partner?

Hoover lost to FDR, FDR started socialism in America, on and on we go

Hmmm. I think I'd have a hard time blaming that on Hoover.

[phk]

I'll curse Herbert Hoover the day the U.S. becomes a Communist Nation.

Can you elaborate on that one partner?

Hoover lost to FDR, FDR started socialism in America, on and on we go

There's an important distinction between liberal or liberalized socialism and Marxist-Leninist or communist socialism.

State-run education here is liberal socialism. Communist socialism implies a transitional alteration in the relations of production that is not present in the capitalist mode of production (according to the philosophy of dialectical materialism, this is determined by contradictions within the economic infrastructure between relations of production and productive forces).

The examples you give, by Marxist standards, function within and according to the logic of the capitalist mode of production, and thus are limited by the capitalist mode of production.

[opebo]

The only objection I have right now to communism, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, is that it takes to long to explain.  Your posts are too verbose!

Can't your system be summed up in a few easy sentences?  If not, I fear people will fight to stamp it out simply to avoid boredom and irritation.

Or perhaps you're a parody by a Republican?  If so, haha!

[David S]

I'll curse Herbert Hoover the day the U.S. becomes a Communist Nation.

Can you elaborate on that one partner?

Hoover lost to FDR, FDR started socialism in America, on and on we go

There's an important distinction between liberal or liberalized socialism and Marxist-Leninist or communist socialism.

State-run education here is liberal socialism. Communist socialism implies a transitional alteration in the relations of production that is not present in the capitalist mode of production (according to the philosophy of dialectical materialism, this is determined by contradictions within the economic infrastructure between relations of production and productive forces).

The examples you give, by Marxist standards, function within and according to the logic of the capitalist mode of production, and thus are limited by the capitalist mode of production.

Two of the three people pictured in your signature were leaders, or should I say dictators, of communist countries. Which one was a success story?

When communists are confronted with the actual results of communism they usually find some detail which they claim is the reason for the failure. They can never accept the idea that communism itself is the problem.

I can't give you an example of a pure capitalist country because there are no purely capitalist countries today. But there is one which is still mostly capitalist. You're living in it. Opebo may tell you that most Americans are dirt poor beggars who are staring to death, but that's nonsense. Yes there are a few who are poor although not starving. But most Americans have comfortable lives. They have jobs that pay decent wages, live in nice houses, own one or more cars, have just about every available appliance. Some have second homes on a lake and a boat too. Where would you find that in China or the former USSR, or any communist country? Americans also have far more freedom than you would find in any communist country. Now Opebo may claim that America is not free because they don't provide free prostitutes to lazy derelicts who don't work, but I suspect you wouldn't get that in the communist countries either. More likely that individual will get sent to Siberia or hung.

You live in the freeist most prosperous country in the world. You have greater opportunity than you would find just about anywhere else. But you are not happy because it doesn't meet your idea of a socialist utopia, one that has never existed anywhere in the world. Wake Up!!!

[phk]

I'll curse Herbert Hoover the day the U.S. becomes a Communist Nation.

Can you elaborate on that one partner?

Hoover lost to FDR, FDR started socialism in America, on and on we go

There's an important distinction between liberal or liberalized socialism and Marxist-Leninist or communist socialism.

State-run education here is liberal socialism. Communist socialism implies a transitional alteration in the relations of production that is not present in the capitalist mode of production (according to the philosophy of dialectical materialism, this is determined by contradictions within the economic infrastructure between relations of production and productive forces).

The examples you give, by Marxist standards, function within and according to the logic of the capitalist mode of production, and thus are limited by the capitalist mode of production.

Two of the three people pictured in your signature were leaders, or should I say dictators, of communist countries. Which one was a success story?

When communists are confronted with the actual results of communism they usually find some detail which they claim is the reason for the failure. They can never accept the idea that communism itself is the problem.

I can't give you an example of a pure capitalist country because there are no purely capitalist countries today. But there is one which is still mostly capitalist. You're living in it. Opebo may tell you that most Americans are dirt poor beggars who are staring to death, but that's nonsense. Yes there are a few who are poor although not starving. But most Americans have comfortable lives. They have jobs that pay decent wages, live in nice houses, own one or more cars, have just about every available appliance. Some have second homes on a lake and a boat too. Where would you find that in China or the former USSR, or any communist country? Americans also have far more freedom than you would find in any communist country. Now Opebo may claim that America is not free because they don't provide free prostitutes to lazy derelicts who don't work, but I suspect you wouldn't get that in the communist countries either. More likely that individual will get sent to Siberia or hung.

You live in the freeist most prosperous country in the world. You have greater opportunity than you would find just about anywhere else. But you are not happy because it doesn't meet your idea of a socialist utopia, one that has never existed anywhere in the world. Wake Up!!!

That doesn't state my views correctly at all. I'm for Communist Republicanism based in the democratic principle of the mass-line: proletarian democracy "from the masses to the masses" rather than bourgeois democracy, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

You should read the second chapter of Lenin's Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky for more on this question of democracy.

Basically, Lenin argues that everything functions in relation to classes. The gist is that the State is an instrument for the repression of class contradictions (cf. The State and Revolution).

We live in a Bourgeois Dictatorship (in which the institutions and apparatuses of the State serve the dominant class - the bourgeois minority - at the expense and exclusion of the proletarian majority) that has expanded to take the shape of a reactionary intercommunal Empire.

This superstructural formation is dialectically determined by the economy, by the relations of production within the capitalist mode of production.

A Communist Republic would be the inverse of this: Proletarian Dictatorship, in which the institutions and apparatuses of the State serve the proletarian majority at the expense and exclusion of the bourgeois minority. This means limiting bourgeois right and empowering the masses through a progressive change in (and enforcing the change in) the relations of production, and as Lenin says, this is "a million times more democratic."

The GDP is not the central issue for communist socialism. On the contrary, the overcoming of the contradictions between productive forces and the relations of production via the socialist transition (which combines aspects of capitalism and communism) from the capitalist mode of production to the communist mode of production is the goal of Marxist-Leninist socialism. However, both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China prior to their revisionist periods (the reinstatement of bureaucrat capitalism in the name of communism under Khrushchev in the mid '50s and Deng Xiaoping in the late '70s, respectively) have demonstrated that a planned economy can advance faster and more rationally (though certainly not without incident - this is the real world, and not an economic model, after all) than the anarchy of the market guided by what Adam Smith calls the "blind hand" of Capital, while taking far better care of the needs of the majority of the people.

The PRC did this more effectively than the Soviet Union, correcting a number of Stalin's errors (cf. Raymond Lotta, Ed., Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism: The Shanghai Textbook for a primary Maoist economic text; E. L. Wheelwright and Bruce McFarlane, The Chinese Road to Socialism: Economics of the Cultural Revolution for an excellent analysis of the particularities of Chinese socialism by two Austrailian economists; and also, for Mao's writtings on these issues, Mao Tse-tung, Critique of Soviet Economics, and "On the Ten Major Relationships" - for more on the question of Stalin, cf. Prof. H. Bruce Franklin's intro to The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings 1905-1952).

History shows us that the crises of the Capitalist business cycle (cf. also this article from the MIA for more on the business cycle) cannot be overcome by either Keynesianism or Monetarism, but can only be put-off by imperialism, in both its neocolonial and military-keynesian variations, and the rise ficticious capital and fiat money, which brings with it new concerns over dollar hegemony.

 I would first say here that I am opposed to utopianism (cf. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific), so I do not strive for "a utopian Communist society." Second, I am not opposed to voting on principle, nor is any other true Leninist. Show me the candidate that will address these issues and I will vote for her. However, in the last election I saw no such candidate. At least it can be said with certainty not to have been the Christian Fascist G. W. Bush or the liberal militarist Senator Kerry. I suppose this is contrary to the beliefs of Noam Chomsky, the self-appointed champion of the people, who did endorse Kerry. I think that's pretty sad, as the Iraq War which Kerry did not really oppose was/is an imperialist war waged for capitalist interest in the name of dollar hegemony, and both the US American troops (children of the working class) and the Iraqi resistance fighters (a colonized people) are caught in the middle.

[David S]

Let me pose a simpler and more direct question:
Would you be happier living in  Russia under Lenin, China under Mao or the USA under any president in its history?

Your poster child Lenin ran that country. Was he not enough of a Leninist to succeed? Was Mao not enough of a Maoist to succeed? Your heros produced only death, poverty and tyranny.

Communism has succeeded only in producing dismal economic performance and making the people slaves of the ruling elite. There are two types of people who support it: There are those who believe it can actually produce great benefits for the people, despite its history of doing the opposite. Those folks may be well meaning, but delusional.
Then there are those who know exactly what communism is and who intend to be among the ruling elite.

Which group do you fall into?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I hate Pamphletese...

[AuH2O]

His rhetoric, silly as it is, most closely resembles Maoist "thought," or in other words, things a crazy person says as they starve 50 million people to death.

Communists are mentally ill people drowned in self-hate or primitive angst. Their relationship to Marx is tangential by nature: Marx admitted Das Kapital, which he worked on for decades, was "pure excretement," and his dialectical theories have been disproven empirically and mathematically.

In fact, remaining Marxist "intellectuals" have simply dropped the economic component of Marx. They admit freely that they have absolutely no understanding of economics or how to do basic things like FEED people in a communist society. These people are not really communists; they are Marxists as a moral philosophy with no hope of realization.

Essentially, then, they are anti-capitalist without an alternative.

In any case, fragments are Marxist thought are all too common in the world. The coherent presentations of that fairy tale have mostly ended, and the remaining "Marxist" forces are pitiful efforts based either on the drug trade or rebellion against a corrupt regime in Nepal.

How to deal with such problems? Consult Suharto of Indonesia.

[Joe Republic]

Communists are mentally ill people drowned in self-hate or primitive angst.

Oh great.  We were all doing fine here till you showed up.


Here come the "facts".....

[AuH2O]

Communists are mentally ill people drowned in self-hate or primitive angst.

Oh great.  We were all doing fine here till you showed up.


Here come the "facts".....

You call getting smoked by a half-baked commie fine?

[Joe Republic]

Communists are mentally ill people drowned in self-hate or primitive angst.

Oh great.  We were all doing fine here till you showed up.


Here come the "facts".....

You call getting smoked by a half-baked commie fine?

That doesn't even make sense.

Read the thread up until your last post and you'll see that we had so far managed to have a relatively civil debate on the pros and cons of Marxist theory.  Admittedly though, the original poster seems to be on his own in his opinion so far.

Calm down first or tone down your rhetoric before spouting off.  Otherwise civil debate just degenerates into pointless name-calling like all the other threads you've posted in.