Calling it communism may be a bit of a reach, but collectivist social organizing in a variety of ways was and still is a very common element of indigenous cultures around the world.
This link focuses on family and child rearing, but it’s a good window into how Australian aboriginals express collectivist principles.
There is, and most have, despite imperial core propaganda to the contrary. Here’s a 1955 CIA report that was declassified in 2008.
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.
Hannah Arendt came from wealth and so unsurprisingly was anticommunist. Her work was financially supported and promoted by the CIA. “Totalitarianism” is a bourgeois liberal, anticommunist construct for the purposes of equivalating fascism and communism.
U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the “Democratic Left” and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.
Communism inevitably will always lead to dictatorship and totalitarianism.
In order to become a communist state, you have to:
1.) Get a bit army or group of people to enforce the upcoming rules.
2.) Force people to get rid of private ownership or threaten them to give it up. This will piss a lot of people off.
3.) Get rid of them if they don’t. This will piss a lot of people off.
4.) Realize that you’ve pissed a lot of people off, and that your the only power in the land, you definitely don’t want to give this up.
5.) Enact a single party system…oh, fuck…
Communism doesn’t work on a large-scale, and it’s not sustainable. By it’s very nature it’s extremely prone to abuse, and fundamentally impossible to install any sort of checks and balances on a single party-system. Look how bad it is with a two-party system in the US.
Communism doesn’t work on a large-scale, and it’s not sustainable.
Have you ever heard of little thing called “economy of scale”? The bigger scale is - the more sustainable it is.
By it’s very nature it’s extremely prone to abuse, and fundamentally impossible to install any sort of checks and balances on a single party-system.
“checks and balances” do not prevent abuse. They are not designed to.
Look how bad it is with a two-party system in the US.
In my opinion two-party system is worse than single-party system and full pluralism. In single-party system there is only one party to blame, while in many-parties system no party can control discourse. While in two-party system both parties can agree to screw over people and finger-point at each-other, only creating illusion of pluralism.
And that besides societal issues two-party system creates like strong polarization.
while in many-parties system no party can control discourse
As someone living in a country having many-party system, the discourse is perfectly controllable in the same way they are doing it in US, just with tiny extra effort. Since 1989 we didn’t had even a single anticapitalist party in parliament despite having sometimes over a dozen of them for several years. Hell in current term we have the most parties - 17 parties + 42 independent parliamentarists on 460 seats in sejm, and still what we hear from all of them is similar on every base question - no alternative to capitalism, neoliberalism in practice, and complete submission to USA and EU in all manners.
The failure of democratic checks and balances does not preclude the failure of communist checks and balances as well.
Democratic Socialism is where I’d like the US to head. But we have to start consistently winning majorities so that we can fix the disproportionate representation that’s hurting progress and making electing the progressives needed for change difficult.
u can believe the cia on that or u can actually fucking learn how these systems work or worked and what people who lived and live in them think of them, imma put it very plainly the percent of Americans who think amerikkka is a democracy is a LOT lower than Chinese people who think China is a democracy. And that hold true for most capitalist countries and most socialist countries past and present.
There, Lenin argued that the soviets and the principle of democratic centralism within the Bolshevik party still assured democracy. However, faced with support for Kronstadt within Bolshevik ranks, Lenin also issued a “temporary” ban on factions in the Russian Communist Party. This ban remained until the revolutions of 1989 and, according to some critics, made the democratic procedures within the party an empty formality, and helped Stalin to consolidate much more authority under the party. Soviets were transformed into the bureaucratic structure that existed for the rest of the history of the Soviet Union and were completely under the control of party officials and the politburo.
Very democratic indeed lol. Can’t wait how they ensure democracy in North Korea next.
Hey look at what the core of the quote you pulled is
I wonder what the ideology of those critics is
Very democratic indeed lol. Can’t wait how they ensure democracy in North Korea next.
Objectively more democratic than the US. In the US you vote for president and they appoint the ministers of every executive agency. In Korea they vote for those directly.
Can’t wait how they ensure democracy in North Korea next
Objectively more democratic than the US.
In Korea they vote for those directly.
They certainly have an interesting method.
Each candidate is preselected by the North Korean government and there is no option to write in a different name, meaning that voters may either submit the ballot unaltered as a “yes” vote or request a pen to cross out the name on the ballot.
Wow you sure did copy and paste from a wikipedia article that doesn’t even bother to source the claim to any of the overtly state propaganda articles at the bottom of the page it uses as a bibliography.
And you didn’t even bother mentioning where you got it so we’re 2 levels of lack of citations deep.
Gee I wonder why leftists constantly criticize anti-communists for being intellectually lazy and dishonest…
I linked the absolute most liberal friendly source for you. Banning factionalism didn’t mean they banned democracy. Banning of factionalism was done when there were literal fascists and Capitalists trying to infiltrate the party and reinstate Tsarism for their profits. You were allowed to have different ifeas, voice them, and vote on them.
It’s very kind of you to have chosen that as a source but it seems to have been an unfortunate pick.
Banning of factionalism was done when there were literal fascists and Capitalists trying to infiltrate the party and reinstate Tsarism for their profits.
It just happens that that was claimed to happen always, so you know, ban was only liften in 1989 as the article mentions lol. Funny how that happens.
You were allowed to have different ifeas, voice them, and vote on them.
Not even mentioning the lack of press freedom but Stalin famously purged a shitload of people on the basis of their political opinions. And voting in a strictly controlled single-party state, it does have the sound of a empty formality as the article had it.
It just happens that that was claimed to happen always, so you know, ban was only liften in 1989 as the article mentions lol. Funny how that happens.
Looks like it was true! Millions of people died when the USSR was illegally dissolved afterwards, and the majority of living former-soviets say they prefered the Soviet System.
Not even mentioning the lack of press freedom but Stalin famously purged a shitload of people on the basis of their political opinions. And voting in a strictly controlled single-party state, it does have the sound of a empty formality as the article had it.
Liberalism and fascism were banned. Additionally, it is not at all an empty formality, unless you think every human being in a political party shares the exact same opinions, which is laughably false.
Looks like it was true! Millions of people died when the USSR was illegally dissolved afterwards, and the majority of living former-soviets say they prefered the Soviet System.
It’s always the case that authoritarian countries use a foreign threat as the reasoning for being so authoritarian. Tale as old as time.
Liberalism and fascism were banned.
So you think capitalist countries banning communist parties is all fine and dandy? Because that’s not terribly democratic if you ask me.
Additionally, it is not at all an empty formality, unless you think every human being in a political party shares the exact same opinions, which is laughably false.
It’s an empty formality when it’s a single party, loyalty to is is demanded and any real criticism can lead you to be fucking killed. Stalin did not take this shit lightly and lots of people died as a result.
You were allowed to have different ifeas, voice them, and vote on them.
There’s an entire wiki page dedicated to how the USSR repressed scientific ideas and promoted absolute idiocracy (such as Lysenkoism) because of politics. If something as (relatively) objective as science wasn’t allowing different ideas you can only imagine what was happening in areas that are far more subjective.
And I can tell you that the “democratic voting” was also just a farce. I can’t find the source anymore but voting didn’t really have oversight. It’s in their voting guidebook, the people counting the votes are also the people who verify the votes. That means the voting committee gets to assign votes however they want because they’re also the ones verifying the votes. From a certain political level onwards the political elite chose who gets what political position. Lysenko is actually excellent example of that because the scientific community hated him, but Stalin loved him and so Lysenko got to fuck up science for multiple decades.
There’s an entire wiki page dedicated to how the USSR repressed scientific ideas and promoted absolute idiocracy (such as Lysenkoism) because of politics. If something as (relatively) objective as science wasn’t allowing different ideas you can only imagine what was happening in areas that are far more subjective.
The USSR was overall very pro-science. In it’s early years, it went through growing pains, as their number one task was centered around instilling Marxism in the population. Marxism itself is founded on Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Certain liberal sciences had been, at the time, focused on Idealism, such as Race Science.
And I can tell you that the “democratic voting” was also just a farce. I can’t find the source anymore but voting didn’t really have oversight. It’s in their voting guidebook, the people counting the votes are also the people who verify the votes. That means the voting committee gets to assign votes however they want because they’re also the ones verifying the votes. From a certain political level onwards the political elite chose who gets what political position. Lysenko is actually excellent example of that because the scientific community hated him, but Stalin loved him and so Lysenko got to fuck up science for multiple decades.
Do you have evidence that the Soviets were assigning votes?
In it’s early years, it went through growing pains, as their number one task was centered around instilling Marxism in the population.
So like the first 3-4 decades? Because they didn’t really turn towards pro-science until the 50s when their ideological science interfered with the nuclear program. And the charlatan Lysenko remained as the director of the Institute of Genetics until 1965.
Do you have evidence that the Soviets were assigning votes?
Of course not. None of the voting results exist, at least I haven’t found any and I did search for them. In fact searching for them is how I stumbled upon the official voting guidebook where it’s written that the voting committee counts and verifies the votes, which leaves the door open for vote manipulation.
Just as I can’t prove they were manipulating votes you can’t prove they weren’t and it comes down to whether you want to believe it or not. Personally I think if they have an official loophole to fudge results then the people in power would use it to stay in power.
It’s really simple - centralization = seat of power
The worst flavor of people are drawn to that like moths to a flame. It’s not even a good idea, any potential economies of scale are wasted by communication lag in the bureaucracy
Decentralization is key. You can have a commune easy enough, humans self organize just fine in small enough communities. There’s communes all over the world doing just fine
The question is, how do you knit those small communities together in a way that doesn’t give anyone much power, but still come together when needed?
Rather than placing absolute power of The State in one person’s hands, start with an elected council of members whose number is not divisible by 2. Transition to a Stateless co-op arrangement. Congratulations you just implemented Communism the way it is intended to be implemented, and no dictator could screw it up.
…and how do you enforce it? No one is going to want to give up the land that they worked for and purchased themselves, or that they developed. Give up your rights or we imprison or kill you?
And who controls this enforcing agency? The single party government? Because you can’t have multiple parties…how do you prevent the government from taking advantage of their position? Like, I don’t think communism is this magical fix-all that you think it is.
Sounds great. Unfortunately it has never succeeded for more than a few months. The last 100+ years have shown that attempting to transition to socialism in that manner doesn’t work. Each time the bourgeoisie manages quickly regain control of the state. Given that the worldwide capitalist class still holds a great majority of the power, siege socialism is the only method to have had any successes to date.
The Six Nations have been using a form of communism, not Marxism, for somewhere between 15,000 to 25,000 years. Works pretty well for them. Aboriginal Australians have done the same for roughly 60,000 years.
I’d say capitalism is the short lived and failed economic system, considering that it’s about 400 years old and rapidly failing.
The Six Nations have been using a form of communism, not Marxism, for somewhere between 15,000 to 25,000 years. Works pretty well for them. Aboriginal Australians have done the same for roughly 60,000 years.
Sure, they had what Marxists call “primitive communism,” but they don’t now. They’re as captured by capitalism as we.
I’d say capitalism is the short lived and failed economic system, considering that it’s about 400 years old and rapidly failing.
I doubt it will fall on its own any time soon, especially if no one builds something to replace it.
“Primitive communism” is a derogatory term with racist undertones. The dismissiveness towards existing methods of collectivism is IMO one of the biggest flaws of Marxist theory. The establishment of an intelligentsia is an idea rooted in this paternalistic arrogance. If Marx had acknowledged the Russian peasantry as an important political class the Russian revolution might have gone very differently.
It isn’t just the wording that’s problematic, it’s the way Marx was dismissive towards the existing methods of collectivism and horizontal organizing. Yes, subsistence farming is a “primitive” mode of production, but the way peasants and indigenous people organized and collectivized resources is not irrelevant to modern industrial modes of production. Marx dismissed the way peasants and indigenous people collectivized resources as “primitive” and argued in favor of centralized power structures. I believe this to be a mistake.
As I said, no such organizing has successfully fended off capitalism for more than a few months, not in the last 150 years. It could work, under some sort of ideal conditions, but not under the material conditions of contemporary history.
This is one of the tests of reading Marx, somehow it’s nearly always evident if someone use the term “primitive” about level of development or is just spewing racism. Problem is that liberals, ultras and such cannot differentiate between the two, but i guess it’s their problem.
I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing the line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly fell into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.
If only there were some kind of way for it to not devolve into totalitarian dictatorship…
Australia had communism for 60,000 years and never developed a dictatorship.
Would you like to provide a link, or any sort of proof to back up this outlandish claim?
Calling it communism may be a bit of a reach, but collectivist social organizing in a variety of ways was and still is a very common element of indigenous cultures around the world.
This link focuses on family and child rearing, but it’s a good window into how Australian aboriginals express collectivist principles.
There is, and most have, despite imperial core propaganda to the contrary. Here’s a 1955 CIA report that was declassified in 2008.
“Totalitarian” is itself propaganda: The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt came from wealth and so unsurprisingly was anticommunist. Her work was financially supported and promoted by the CIA. “Totalitarianism” is a bourgeois liberal, anticommunist construct for the purposes of equivalating fascism and communism.
Monthly Review, The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited
If fact almost all of the “Western left” (that wasn’t repressed by the red scares) was captured by the imperial core’s propaganda machine: Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism
“devolve”
Big fan of Tsarist Russia, Feudal China, Colonial Japan, and Batista Cuba I take it.
It starts with a high minded idea and promise of freeing people and whatnot, then it just turns around back to authoritarian rule.
lucky u, there is; its called just doing the fucking thing like normal, cuz non of the historical examples did that so u know.
Communism inevitably will always lead to dictatorship and totalitarianism.
In order to become a communist state, you have to: 1.) Get a bit army or group of people to enforce the upcoming rules. 2.) Force people to get rid of private ownership or threaten them to give it up. This will piss a lot of people off. 3.) Get rid of them if they don’t. This will piss a lot of people off. 4.) Realize that you’ve pissed a lot of people off, and that your the only power in the land, you definitely don’t want to give this up. 5.) Enact a single party system…oh, fuck…
Communism doesn’t work on a large-scale, and it’s not sustainable. By it’s very nature it’s extremely prone to abuse, and fundamentally impossible to install any sort of checks and balances on a single party-system. Look how bad it is with a two-party system in the US.
Have you ever heard of little thing called “economy of scale”? The bigger scale is - the more sustainable it is.
“checks and balances” do not prevent abuse. They are not designed to.
In my opinion two-party system is worse than single-party system and full pluralism. In single-party system there is only one party to blame, while in many-parties system no party can control discourse. While in two-party system both parties can agree to screw over people and finger-point at each-other, only creating illusion of pluralism.
And that besides societal issues two-party system creates like strong polarization.
As someone living in a country having many-party system, the discourse is perfectly controllable in the same way they are doing it in US, just with tiny extra effort. Since 1989 we didn’t had even a single anticapitalist party in parliament despite having sometimes over a dozen of them for several years. Hell in current term we have the most parties - 17 parties + 42 independent parliamentarists on 460 seats in sejm, and still what we hear from all of them is similar on every base question - no alternative to capitalism, neoliberalism in practice, and complete submission to USA and EU in all manners.
Buddy, checks and balances are one of the many reasons why our democracy doesn’t work. I already covered this elsewhere in this very post.
The failure of democratic checks and balances does not preclude the failure of communist checks and balances as well.
Democratic Socialism is where I’d like the US to head. But we have to start consistently winning majorities so that we can fix the disproportionate representation that’s hurting progress and making electing the progressives needed for change difficult.
u can believe the cia on that or u can actually fucking learn how these systems work or worked and what people who lived and live in them think of them, imma put it very plainly the percent of Americans who think amerikkka is a democracy is a LOT lower than Chinese people who think China is a democracy. And that hold true for most capitalist countries and most socialist countries past and present.
yesbut did you consider that chinese people are very stupid and brainwashed by 5g havana syndrome /s
Where has that happened?
Just like, everywhere they’ve tried it.
You must have an odd definition of Totalitarian Dictatorship then, I suppose.
Soviet Union under Stalin comes to mind. North Korea.
That wasn’t totalitarian nor a dictatorship. Soviet Democracy continued to be practiced, and Stalin’s authority wasn’t absolute or all-encompassing.
Where does a state go from a non-totalitarian, non-dictatorship to a Totalitarian Dictatorship?
From the very article you linked:
Very democratic indeed lol. Can’t wait how they ensure democracy in North Korea next.
Hey look at what the core of the quote you pulled is
I wonder what the ideology of those critics is
Objectively more democratic than the US. In the US you vote for president and they appoint the ministers of every executive agency. In Korea they vote for those directly.
They certainly have an interesting method.
Uhhum.
Wow you sure did copy and paste from a wikipedia article that doesn’t even bother to source the claim to any of the overtly state propaganda articles at the bottom of the page it uses as a bibliography.
And you didn’t even bother mentioning where you got it so we’re 2 levels of lack of citations deep.
Gee I wonder why leftists constantly criticize anti-communists for being intellectually lazy and dishonest…
I mean I assumed (correctly) you’d figure it was from Wikipedia. How does the North Korean government describe their elections process?
I linked the absolute most liberal friendly source for you. Banning factionalism didn’t mean they banned democracy. Banning of factionalism was done when there were literal fascists and Capitalists trying to infiltrate the party and reinstate Tsarism for their profits. You were allowed to have different ifeas, voice them, and vote on them.
It’s very kind of you to have chosen that as a source but it seems to have been an unfortunate pick.
It just happens that that was claimed to happen always, so you know, ban was only liften in 1989 as the article mentions lol. Funny how that happens.
Not even mentioning the lack of press freedom but Stalin famously purged a shitload of people on the basis of their political opinions. And voting in a strictly controlled single-party state, it does have the sound of a empty formality as the article had it.
Looks like it was true! Millions of people died when the USSR was illegally dissolved afterwards, and the majority of living former-soviets say they prefered the Soviet System.
Liberalism and fascism were banned. Additionally, it is not at all an empty formality, unless you think every human being in a political party shares the exact same opinions, which is laughably false.
What a bunch of fucking nonsense, holy shit…
It’s always the case that authoritarian countries use a foreign threat as the reasoning for being so authoritarian. Tale as old as time.
So you think capitalist countries banning communist parties is all fine and dandy? Because that’s not terribly democratic if you ask me.
It’s an empty formality when it’s a single party, loyalty to is is demanded and any real criticism can lead you to be fucking killed. Stalin did not take this shit lightly and lots of people died as a result.
There’s an entire wiki page dedicated to how the USSR repressed scientific ideas and promoted absolute idiocracy (such as Lysenkoism) because of politics. If something as (relatively) objective as science wasn’t allowing different ideas you can only imagine what was happening in areas that are far more subjective.
And I can tell you that the “democratic voting” was also just a farce. I can’t find the source anymore but voting didn’t really have oversight. It’s in their voting guidebook, the people counting the votes are also the people who verify the votes. That means the voting committee gets to assign votes however they want because they’re also the ones verifying the votes. From a certain political level onwards the political elite chose who gets what political position. Lysenko is actually excellent example of that because the scientific community hated him, but Stalin loved him and so Lysenko got to fuck up science for multiple decades.
The USSR was overall very pro-science. In it’s early years, it went through growing pains, as their number one task was centered around instilling Marxism in the population. Marxism itself is founded on Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Certain liberal sciences had been, at the time, focused on Idealism, such as Race Science.
Do you have evidence that the Soviets were assigning votes?
So like the first 3-4 decades? Because they didn’t really turn towards pro-science until the 50s when their ideological science interfered with the nuclear program. And the charlatan Lysenko remained as the director of the Institute of Genetics until 1965.
Of course not. None of the voting results exist, at least I haven’t found any and I did search for them. In fact searching for them is how I stumbled upon the official voting guidebook where it’s written that the voting committee counts and verifies the votes, which leaves the door open for vote manipulation.
Just as I can’t prove they were manipulating votes you can’t prove they weren’t and it comes down to whether you want to believe it or not. Personally I think if they have an official loophole to fudge results then the people in power would use it to stay in power.
Same for all forms of government including capitalism.
If only there were some kind of way for liberals to learn the actual histories of AES states…
It’s really simple - centralization = seat of power
The worst flavor of people are drawn to that like moths to a flame. It’s not even a good idea, any potential economies of scale are wasted by communication lag in the bureaucracy
Decentralization is key. You can have a commune easy enough, humans self organize just fine in small enough communities. There’s communes all over the world doing just fine
The question is, how do you knit those small communities together in a way that doesn’t give anyone much power, but still come together when needed?
Rather than placing absolute power of The State in one person’s hands, start with an elected council of members whose number is not divisible by 2. Transition to a Stateless co-op arrangement. Congratulations you just implemented Communism the way it is intended to be implemented, and no dictator could screw it up.
…and how do you enforce it? No one is going to want to give up the land that they worked for and purchased themselves, or that they developed. Give up your rights or we imprison or kill you?
And who controls this enforcing agency? The single party government? Because you can’t have multiple parties…how do you prevent the government from taking advantage of their position? Like, I don’t think communism is this magical fix-all that you think it is.
Sounds great. Unfortunately it has never succeeded for more than a few months. The last 100+ years have shown that attempting to transition to socialism in that manner doesn’t work. Each time the bourgeoisie manages quickly regain control of the state. Given that the worldwide capitalist class still holds a great majority of the power, siege socialism is the only method to have had any successes to date.
The Six Nations have been using a form of communism, not Marxism, for somewhere between 15,000 to 25,000 years. Works pretty well for them. Aboriginal Australians have done the same for roughly 60,000 years.
I’d say capitalism is the short lived and failed economic system, considering that it’s about 400 years old and rapidly failing.
Sure, they had what Marxists call “primitive communism,” but they don’t now. They’re as captured by capitalism as we.
I doubt it will fall on its own any time soon, especially if no one builds something to replace it.
“Primitive communism” is a derogatory term with racist undertones. The dismissiveness towards existing methods of collectivism is IMO one of the biggest flaws of Marxist theory. The establishment of an intelligentsia is an idea rooted in this paternalistic arrogance. If Marx had acknowledged the Russian peasantry as an important political class the Russian revolution might have gone very differently.
I suppose it is a problem, thanks to “primitive” often meaning “subhuman.”
It isn’t just the wording that’s problematic, it’s the way Marx was dismissive towards the existing methods of collectivism and horizontal organizing. Yes, subsistence farming is a “primitive” mode of production, but the way peasants and indigenous people organized and collectivized resources is not irrelevant to modern industrial modes of production. Marx dismissed the way peasants and indigenous people collectivized resources as “primitive” and argued in favor of centralized power structures. I believe this to be a mistake.
As I said, no such organizing has successfully fended off capitalism for more than a few months, not in the last 150 years. It could work, under some sort of ideal conditions, but not under the material conditions of contemporary history.
This is one of the tests of reading Marx, somehow it’s nearly always evident if someone use the term “primitive” about level of development or is just spewing racism. Problem is that liberals, ultras and such cannot differentiate between the two, but i guess it’s their problem.
Man I wish.