Stalinism is not communism.

[Vetalia]

Have you read Spufford's Red Plenty? A very interesting book on the topic

Nope, but now that you mentioned it and I looked it up on Amazon, I will in 3-5 business days...the Khrushchev era in particular is my focus because it's the most prosperous period in Soviet history.

[Alaje]

Those two will never be operable in an advanced society, which is why I'm a Syndicalist.

Brother!

[4years]

This again, really?

[4years]

Start with NOT PURGES. Actually give power to workers' councils. Decentralise government and reduce its powers. Defend and expand freedom of speech and the press. Hold elections. Establish an actually honest planning commission whose results would be treated like recommendations instead of orders, thus eliminating the incentive to falsify the records to show consistently increased production. Don't implement a command economy. Convert workplaces to either workers' self-management or workplace democracy. Remove government entirely from the equation, make labour unions independent and powerful. Basically combine the Scandinavian model, the measures taken during the Paris Commune and Civil War-era Catalonia, and Reds!. Condiment strongly with the programmes of the 1956 Hungarian rebels and Alexander Dubcek's reforms.

I'm not exactly sure how you'll eventually get to the part where the state is abolished, but at least you can get as far as socialism with a human face. Class could probably be successfully abolished, currency maybe depending on how big the respective society is, but abolishing the state is unlikely except if there's a global communist revolution.

Good everything is good one question....

How are you gonna stop the foreign powers from Crushing you to pieces?

CTALNH: To avoid being crushed by forgien powers... Foster revolution in their territory. Keep an army right up to the abolition of the state. Have enough territory and a large enough population to be difficult to be defeated. Pretty much the same way any modern state does it.

Zaras: To abolish the state.... Basically the state withers away when it is not needed. Gobal communist revolution as happened, currency and class abolished, means of production being manged by the workers. Any other councils and orginizational strutures set up. The state disapears when society no longer needs it to function.

[CTALNH]

Good everything is good one question....

How are you gonna stop the foreign powers from Crushing you to pieces?

CTALNH: To avoid being crushed by forgien powers... Foster revolution in their territory. Keep an army right up to the abolition of the state. Have enough territory and a large enough population to be difficult to be defeated. Pretty much the same way any modern state does it.

Zaras: To abolish the state.... Basically the state withers away when it is not needed. Gobal communist revolution as happened, currency and class abolished, means of production being manged by the workers. Any other councils and orginizational strutures set up. The state disapears when society no longer needs it to function.

You are more naive than i though

[4years]

CTALNH: To avoid being crushed by forgien powers... Foster revolution in their territory. Keep an army right up to the abolition of the state. Have enough territory and a large enough population to be difficult to be defeated. Pretty much the same way any modern state does it.

Zaras: To abolish the state.... Basically the state withers away when it is not needed. Gobal communist revolution as happened, currency and class abolished, means of production being manged by the workers. Any other councils and orginizational strutures set up. The state disapears when society no longer needs it to function.

You are more naive than i though

You claim it is naive to agree with Marx, and you call yourself a communist?

[Zaras]

You are more naive than i though

You claim it is naive to agree with Marx, and you call yourself a communist?

He's no communist, he's Stalin's bootlicker.

[Old Irish States]

You will never create a classless, stateless society with no form of money or government. That is a pure utopia, an unstable one. Your Communism requires humans to operate on a perfect scale, humans aren't perfect, they're corrupt. Men will always seize power. You can never abolish a state or a government, not permanently. Keep living your dream and I'll keep living reality

[4years]

You claim it is naive to agree with Marx, and you call yourself a communist?

He's no communist, he's Stalin's bootlicker.

I know that. However, has refered to himself as communist and has refered to Stalin as communist. I was merely mocking the fact that he has called himself communist and yet called me naive when I submitted an idea that agrees with Marx.

[Zaras]

You will never create a classless, stateless society with no form of money or government. That is a pure utopia, an unstable one. Your Communism requires humans to operate on a perfect scale, humans aren't perfect, they're corrupt.

Yawn. Heard that a million times before.

You can never abolish a state or a government, not permanently.

Paris and Barcelona disagree.

Somalia too.

Keep living your dream and I'll keep living reality.

Oh how mature.

[Threlizdun]

You can never abolish a state or a government, not permanently.

Paris and Barcelona disagree.

Permanently is a key word. They certainly are viable examples of communism put into practice, and I do believe that such societies can be successfully implemented and maintained, but for the arguement stated they do not work.

Somalia too.

Somalia is not a stateless society.

[CTALNH]

He's no communist, he's Stalin's bootlicker.

I know that. However, has refered to himself as communist and has refered to Stalin as communist. I was merely mocking the fact that he has called himself communist and yet called me naive when I submitted an idea that agrees with Marx.

I am not disagreeing with you about what marx said I told you that your naive because there is no way that you can make all the people in other countries rebel in your favor why? Well when the revolution happened in 1917 indeed there we had quite a lot of supporters in other countries and they indeed tryied to rebel but they were all brutally supressed by the capitalist regimes

[Zaras]

Paris and Barcelona disagree.

Permanently is a key word. They certainly are viable examples of communism put into practice, and I do believe that such societies can be successfully implemented and maintained, but for the arguement stated they do not work.

I know they didn't succeed permanently, but that was because they were repressed.

Somalia is not a stateless society.

It's a country with multiple overlapping states, I guess.

[CTALNH]

Yes what I was saying?
Communism is not anarchism!

[Zaras]

Yes what I was saying?
Communism is not anarchism!

Don't gravedig just to spew more of your idiocy at us, CTALNH.

Communism is anarchist in the same way that Earth is the third planet from the Sun: denying it makes you a moonbat.

[Of the Free Socialist Territories]

Yes what I was saying?
Communism is not anarchism!

You gravedug in order to post something entirely wrong while entirely ignoring an OP based almost entirely upon Marx and Engels' writings?

[Divair]

Yes what I was saying?
Communism is not anarchism!

Communism is anarchistic. That is a fact.

[The Huskar Social Union]

Yes what I was saying?
Communism is not anarchism!

You gravedug in order to post something entirely wrong while entirely ignoring an OP based almost entirely upon Marx and Engels' writings?

Ive lost the very, very, very small amount of seriousness i had for him now.

edit: Also i know i am late an all but this is an awesome thread, thanks for it. I just didnt have the time before.

[CTALNH]

Yes what I was saying?
Communism is not anarchism!

Communism is anarchistic. That is a fact.

S#$# that means Engels and Marx died in vain trying to explain that its not anarchism.... and you people not having read read what Engels wrote "on Authority" explains why....
I blame Bakunin....

[Kvatchdom]

Communism is anarchistic. That is a fact.

S#$# that means Engels and Marx died in vain trying to explain that its not anarchism.... and you people not having read read what Engels wrote "on Authority" explains why....
I blame Bakunin....

Engels wasn't authoritarian. Neither was Marx. Both of them rejected the need for a state, thus they were libertarian.

[Vashtanaraada]

A UNITED LEFT FTW

[CTALNH]

S#$# that means Engels and Marx died in vain trying to explain that its not anarchism.... and you people not having read read what Engels wrote "on Authority" explains why....
I blame Bakunin....

Engels wasn't authoritarian. Neither was Marx. Both of them rejected the need for a state, thus they were libertarian.

Not you too....
These people are saying that communism = anarchism which is inherently stupid

They are anti authoritarians which think that after the upcoming revolution whenever that may be (because I am sure us hell they aren't going to take up arms and cause the revolution because of their self righteous humanist ideas)will abolish the state without even having met the criteria of making the state wither away....

Exactly what Engels wrote on Authority....

And for reason I can't understand why they think Marx and Engels supported the Paris commune?....

Which were in fact against and warned them not to do it....But still in the end it was us Marx said it was "doomed to fail"...

I am not saying Marx didn't welcome the uprising but he was against its own foolishnesses and these kind of people....

[Yorkopolis]

Communism is anarchistic. That is a fact.

S#$# that means Engels and Marx died in vain trying to explain that its not anarchism.... and you people not having read read what Engels wrote "on Authority" explains why....
I blame Bakunin....

Communism (from Latin communis - common, universal) is a revolutionary socialist movement to create a classless and stateless social order structured upon common ownership of the means of production, as well as a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of this social order.

What part of this do you not get? Marx certainly did not desire for a totalitarian order and neither did Engels. I have read Engels' On Authority but nowhere did Engels say that the state should be completely authoritarian let alone totalitarian. You very dearly misinterpreted (either on purpose or by accident) that Engels never at all desired the state to become excessively authoritarian. All he did desire was the de-politicalization of the state, in other words the disappearance of the political - ideological - state that is devouted to a single ideology, which will be replaced by a state which does purely things in the name of its people, not in the name of some ideology.

I quote:

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. 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?

It does state that he does not want the political state abolished at a single stroke, but he doesn't ever state that he wants a totalitarian - let alone extremely authoritarian - social order.

[Kvatchdom]

Engels wasn't authoritarian. Neither was Marx. Both of them rejected the need for a state, thus they were libertarian.

Not you too....
These people are saying that communism = anarchism which is inherently stupid

They are anti authoritarians which think that after the upcoming revolution whenever that may be (because I am sure us hell they aren't going to take up arms and cause the revolution because of their self righteous humanist ideas)will abolish the state without even having met the criteria of making the state wither away....

Exactly what Engels wrote on Authority....

And for reason I can't understand why they think Marx and Engels supported the Paris commune?....

Which were in fact against and warned them not to do it....But still in the end it was us Marx said it was "doomed to fail"...

I am not saying Marx didn't welcome the uprising but he was against its own foolishnesses and these kind of people....

Not necessarily anti-authoritarians, but anti-Stalinists. And nope. Stalin didn't even try to reach that point. And of course they know that after the revolution there must be a socialist state, but that does not mean the socialist state kills fellow revolutionaries(Like Stalin did).

Doesn't mean he was authoritarian. A person who wishes the state to wither away, cannot be authoritarian.

They didn't, because it was unstable and full of crime. Not because it was anarchic.

He was against the lack of socialism before the withering, and the amount of crime, not the anarchy.

[CTALNH]

S#$# that means Engels and Marx died in vain trying to explain that its not anarchism.... and you people not having read read what Engels wrote "on Authority" explains why....
I blame Bakunin....

Communism (from Latin communis - common, universal) is a revolutionary socialist movement to create a classless and stateless social order structured upon common ownership of the means of production, as well as a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of this social order.

What part of this do you not get? Marx certainly did not desire for a totalitarian order and neither did Engels. I have read Engels' On Authority but nowhere did Engels say that the state should be completely authoritarian let alone totalitarian. You very dearly misinterpreted (either on purpose or by accident) that Engels never at all desired the state to become excessively authoritarian. All he did desire was the de-politicalization of the state, in other words the disappearance of the political - ideological - state that is devouted to a single ideology, which will be replaced by a state which does purely things in the name of its people, not in the name of some ideology.

I quote:

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. 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?

It does state that he does not want the political state abolished at a single stroke, but he doesn't ever state that he wants a totalitarian - let alone extremely authoritarian - social order.

Yes and you seem to be forgetting the line where he says :"The revolution will be forged in a sea of blood..."