Comment by inawarminister
4 years ago
I agree with you, we also see the same WRT communists.
Murderous antiquated ideologies should be eradicated from the modern world.
4 years ago
I agree with you, we also see the same WRT communists.
Murderous antiquated ideologies should be eradicated from the modern world.
Communist ideology has nothing to do with murder. It is 100% an economic ideology, and primarily about equality.
Some countries that called themselves communist, and attempted to implement parts of communism, also committed mass murders. But that doesn't reflect on communism as an ideology any more than the actions of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea reflect on democracy.
What a country calls themselves and what they actually are don't always bear any resemblance to each other, and decades of US propaganda notwithstanding, "communism" and "socialism" have absolutely nothing to do with mass murder or authoritarianism.
On the other hand, Nazi ideology is very much about murder, and about forcing anyone who isn't The Master Race into second-class citizen status (or worse).
"But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."
- Engels, On Authority 1872
Thanks for this incredibly insightful and completely on-topic quote. From this i can clearly see that the very dream of a more equitable and less late-stage-capitalist future is inevitably doomed, and all forms of communism must be rejected. While the landed gentry obviously have our best interests at heart, and it surely is best to try and pry our futures from their grips by words alone! No drastic action, no revolutions.
As Engels said, any form of revolution is a oxymoron and thus always fails!
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> Communist ideology has nothing to do with murder. It is 100% an economic ideology, and primarily about equality.
"Revolutionary violence" is a key principle of Marxist-Leninist ideology:
> At the outset of his revolutionary career, Lenin embraced a doctrine of organized violence that would attack capitalism from above and below, the revolutionary leaders to create new structures of governance while inciting and focusing the concentrated fury of the masses on the destruction of the old. Prior to the revolution he vigorously defended this doctrine both against those who would implement violence prematurely, without developing its mass or organized character, and those who would reject violence altogether. Once in power he initiated the fission of Russian society, using state structures specifically designed to implement violence - the political police, the army, the armed grain collection detachments - to lead the masses against large segments of the population whom he labeled 'enemies of the regime'. From November 1917 to March 1921 he pursued a policy (retroactively named 'War Communism') of mass, relatively indiscriminate violence against the bourgeoisie, capitalists large and small, much of the peasantry and, indeed, anyone who violated any of his many decrees.
Witte, J. (1993). Violence in Lenin’s thought and practice: The spark and the conflagration. Terrorism and Political Violence, 5(3), 135–203. doi:10.1080/09546559308427223
Communists are no longer a threat anywhere outside the PRC and North Korea.
And Venezuela. And Cuba. And Vietnam. And Laos. And and and.
Neither of these countries is a threat to anyone.
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And the Nazis...? In both cases, the problem is latent inside our societies. The dam bursts and revolutionary fervor appear until checked away. Not until a large amount of innocent victims.
PRC is state capitalist as well, rhetoric notwithstanding. They even needed to purge their Marxists a few years back.
Wait what, there aren't any nazi states as far as I'm aware but the PRC and North Korea are both real and have nukes? There are still communist political parties in every western democracy.