Should democracy get tough on communist party's in the west?

[Trotskylvania]

This is just as silly as the inverse.

Don't think so. After all, swastikas never killed anyone. Also, everyone keeps whining about the holocaust, but always forgets the holodomor, which is a stalinist equivalent to the holocaust. What's so different about them? Oh yeah, it was about racism in the holocaust. And in holodomor, people were killed even more than in the holocaust. Doesn't matter, because it was about racism in the holocaust. WHAT THE HELL, PEOPLE???

No, but the people who made the swastika their symbol sure killed a whole bunch.

When people's belief is in totalitarianism, and the extermination of others, and they begin organizing to that effect, even the most elementary, simplistic commitment to democracy and freedom requires that you thwart them. But you can't criminalize the implementation of a belief, or the conspiracy to the implement a belief, without implicitly indicting the belief itself.

In countries like Germany, which had been under the control of totalitarian regimes, the establishing of a stable democratic regime requires the eradication of the old ideology. It's not nice, and it's not pretty. But let's not pretend for one moment that DeNazification in Germany wasn't necessary.

[Randy F Marsh]

A lot of people here should look up what communism is...

Considering how people bitch about it so often, I'm surprised most people are completely unaware of how democratic communism really is.

I mean, what could be more democratic than the workers themselves owning the means of production, which belong to them in the first place since they, you know, produce everything people buy?

But hey, fuck educating ourselves. Education takes too much brain power.

I don't think it's communism in the ideal sense that is unappealing, but how efforts to implement it has fared since the early 20th century. This is not to say that a communist revolution is inherently flawed, often ending in death and disaster more often than not, it's how any revolution can be so dangerous, so unpredictable, so uncontrollable that is of great concern.

[Acrainia]

No they should be able to do as they please.

However if they ever come to power it would be prudent to watch them very closely. Communism has a strong tendency towards authoritarianism, as does any ideology that claims to represent the "true interests" of the people regardless of how many of those people actually support them.

There's a fair chance that a communist government won't regard any election in which they lose as legitimate, seeing as they regard anyone who doesn't support communism as either ignorant of it or was manipulated by capitalists to vote against their best interests.

I'd like to stress this does not apply to all communists, but many of them seem too caught up in their own ideology to believe that they could ever potentially lose a legitimate election. Its these people who open the reeducation camps and start treating anyone who criticizes them as either a traitor or mentally ill, creating a society in which they are accountable to nobody but themselves and can never be wrong.

[Individual]

And in holodomor, people were killed even more than in the holocaust.

False.

http://www.distributedrepublic.net/arch ... ly-murder/

[Of the Free Socialist Territories]

False.

http://www.distributedrepublic.net/arch ... ly-murder/

"3,500,000 died in the 1930-1936 collectivization"

That is a number which is less than 6 million.

Therefore your statement that more people died in the Holodomor, a Ukrainian term referring to the famines and not the purges or anything else, than in the Holocaust is demonstrably false.

[Agymnum]

No they should be able to do as they please.

However if they ever come to power it would be prudent to watch them very closely. Communism has a strong tendency towards authoritarianism, as does any ideology that claims to represent the "true interests" of the people regardless of how many of those people actually support them.

There's a fair chance that a communist government won't regard any election in which they lose as legitimate, seeing as they regard anyone who doesn't support communism as either ignorant of it or was manipulated by capitalists to vote against their best interests.

I'd like to stress this does not apply to all communists, but many of them seem too caught up in their own ideology to believe that they could ever potentially lose a legitimate election. Its these people who open the reeducation camps and start treating anyone who criticizes them as either a traitor or mentally ill, creating a society in which they are accountable to nobody but themselves and can never be wrong.

The point of communism is to eliminate the government. Communism is pure anarchy - a classless society where the state is not needed to regulate economics nor politics because the people are educated and know how to control their lives and their property.

Any communist party claiming it wants to spread communism in that single nation is simply not communist. The only true communists are internationalists, such as the IWW organization.

[Kvatchdom]

Nope.

Also, most of the communist parties shifted away from the dangerous Stalinist perspective.

[Imperiatom]

In that case one might argue that since everyone cannot control everything or all of the same mind, it is impossible to have a system of law and run any form of production without a state or private enterprise. This would lead to the conclusion that Marxism is the fanciful ramblings of an idiot who had no understanding of the human Psyche, and the Stalinist or the current Chinese way is the only way of implementing communism in reality.

Did you even read the thread?

Yes i am saying that since Marxism is probably impossible to bring into reality then it is describing something that never has existed or will likely exist. But if a nations sated aim is to achieve communism then it does not matter how far they got as long they were aiming for communism and so they are communist.

[Trotskylvania]

False.

http://www.distributedrepublic.net/arch ... ly-murder/

No, Rummel is an idiot who ignores the most elementary demographic evidence, which has all come to light since the fall of the Soviet Union. Evidence which academically honest reactionaries like Conquest used to revise down their estimates of excess deaths in the Soviet Union.

[Of the Free Socialist Territories]

Yes i am saying that since Marxism is probably impossible to bring into reality then it is describing something that never has existed or will likely exist. But if a nations sated aim is to achieve communism then it does not matter how far they got as long they were aiming for communism and so they are communist.

Except a nation's stated aim is not necessarily what said nation is actually aiming for.

Again, Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korea is not a democracy. It states that it is democratic. This does not make it a democracy, and this does not discredit democracy.

[Imperiatom]

In that case one might argue that since everyone cannot control everything or all of the same mind, it is impossible to have a system of law and run any form of production without a state or private enterprise.

You might argue that.

You'd be bullshitting, but you might argue it.

This would lead to the conclusion that Marxism is the fanciful ramblings of an idiot who had no understanding of the human Psyche,

Debatable. You might also argue that it's a massively misunderstood theory and is pretty damn individualist.

and the Stalinist

What? Shooting communists is the only way to implement communism?

or the current Chinese way

That'd be dirigiste capitalism tending towards unregulated capitalism.

is the only way of implementing communism in reality.

Well, one of them involves executing communists, and the other one is essentially capitalism but even worse, so I don't know how you'd come to that conclusion without not knowing what the term means.

You say its bullshit but has there ever been a true Marxist nation?

[Agymnum]

Did you even read the thread?

Yes i am saying that since Marxism is probably impossible to bring into reality then it is describing something that never has existed or will likely exist. But if a nations sated aim is to achieve communism then it does not matter how far they got as long they were aiming for communism and so they are communist.

So if a nation aims to achieve democracy by killing all anti-democratic dissidents in order to establish a stable nation upon which democracy can exist, it's obviously democratic since they were aiming for democracy.

Your argument is not holding up well when applied to other ideologies. Communism is not special. Those who claim they are communist but don't instigate communist reform are not really communists. Just like how those who claim they are democratic but don't instigate democratic reform are not really democratic.

What a novel interpretation, this is.

[Individual]

http://www.distributedrepublic.net/arch ... ly-murder/

"3,500,000 died in the 1930-1936 collectivization"

That is a number which is less than 6 million.

Therefore your statement that more people died in the Holodomor, a Ukrainian term referring to the famines and not the purges or anything else, than in the Holocaust is demonstrably false.

Whoops, my bad. I mistook the terms and meant the actual genocides, purges, whatever. Sorry about that.

[Individual]

http://www.distributedrepublic.net/arch ... ly-murder/

No, Rummel is an idiot who ignores the most elementary demographic evidence, which has all come to light since the fall of the Soviet Union. Evidence which academically honest reactionaries like Conquest used to revise down their estimates of excess deaths in the Soviet Union.

Yes, and I am sure you can source that.

[Of the Free Socialist Territories]

You might argue that.

You'd be bullshitting, but you might argue it.



Debatable. You might also argue that it's a massively misunderstood theory and is pretty damn individualist.



What? Shooting communists is the only way to implement communism?



That'd be dirigiste capitalism tending towards unregulated capitalism.



Well, one of them involves executing communists, and the other one is essentially capitalism but even worse, so I don't know how you'd come to that conclusion without not knowing what the term means.

You say its bullshit but has there ever been a true Marxist nation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_ ... on_of_1956
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_Soviet_Republic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune

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Those had Marxist characteristics.

And then there were the more directly anarchist-oriented Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (until the Stalinists got their hands on it) and the Makhnovshchina (the Ukrainian Free Territory).

But I digress. What's your point?

[Imperiatom]

http://www.distributedrepublic.net/arch ... ly-murder/

"3,500,000 died in the 1930-1936 collectivization"

That is a number which is less than 6 million.

Therefore your statement that more people died in the Holodomor, a Ukrainian term referring to the famines and not the purges or anything else, than in the Holocaust is demonstrably false.

some Estimates range up to about 8 million.

[Trotskylvania]

You might argue that.

You'd be bullshitting, but you might argue it.



Debatable. You might also argue that it's a massively misunderstood theory and is pretty damn individualist.



What? Shooting communists is the only way to implement communism?



That'd be dirigiste capitalism tending towards unregulated capitalism.



Well, one of them involves executing communists, and the other one is essentially capitalism but even worse, so I don't know how you'd come to that conclusion without not knowing what the term means.

You say its bullshit but has there ever been a true Marxist nation?

Marx did not lay out blue prints, only generalities.

There have been societies that approach these generalities to varying degrees (the Paris Commune, the CNT-FAI during the Spanish Revolution, the Ukrainian Free Territory), but their revolutions did not begin for strictly Marxist reasons, which is to say the the generalization of a crisis period in capitalist economy that spreads a revolutionary transformation.

Respectively, they were caused by the collapse of the Second Empire in France after humiliating military defeat, the coup d'etat by the Spanish Army and Falangists against the Second Spanish Republic, and the dissolution of traditional authority in Ukraine, leaving the anarcho-communists to organize resistance to Ukrainian reactionaries and the Germans who supported them.

[Of the Free Socialist Territories]

"3,500,000 died in the 1930-1936 collectivization"

That is a number which is less than 6 million.

Therefore your statement that more people died in the Holodomor, a Ukrainian term referring to the famines and not the purges or anything else, than in the Holocaust is demonstrably false.

some Estimates range up to about 8 million.

For the Holodomor? Those estimates are bullshit.

[Imperiatom]

You say its bullshit but has there ever been a true Marxist nation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_ ... on_of_1956
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_Soviet_Republic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune

And then there were the more directly anarchist-oriented Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (until the Stalinists got their hands on it) and the Makhnovshchina (the Ukrainian Free Territory).

But I digress. What's your point?

How any of those qualify as a nation when none of them won their bid for "freedom" i don't know. Were any recognized by a majority of the worlds nations?

[Individual]

"3,500,000 died in the 1930-1936 collectivization"

That is a number which is less than 6 million.

Therefore your statement that more people died in the Holodomor, a Ukrainian term referring to the famines and not the purges or anything else, than in the Holocaust is demonstrably false.

some Estimates range up to about 8 million.

The holodomor was the stalinist collectivization, not the genocide.

[Ovisterra]

This thread is everything that's wrong with NSG.

[Of the Free Socialist Territories]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_ ... on_of_1956
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_Soviet_Republic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune

And then there were the more directly anarchist-oriented Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (until the Stalinists got their hands on it) and the Makhnovshchina (the Ukrainian Free Territory).

But I digress. What's your point?

How any of those qualify as a nation when none of them won their bid for "freedom" i don't know. Were any recognized by a majority of the worlds nations?

Except the "nation", as in the nation-state, is a concept alien to communism, so by definition there have been none. There have been societies, cities and polities, but not nation-states.

And of course they weren't recognised by a world dominated by capitalist states, why the hell would they have been?

[Agymnum]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_ ... on_of_1956
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_Soviet_Republic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune

And then there were the more directly anarchist-oriented Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (until the Stalinists got their hands on it) and the Makhnovshchina (the Ukrainian Free Territory).

But I digress. What's your point?

How any of those qualify as a nation when none of them won their bid for "freedom" i don't know. Were any recognized by a majority of the worlds nations?

The Soviet Union wasn't recognized by the League of Nations in its early years.

Obviously that means the Soviet Union did not exist.

[Imperiatom]

some Estimates range up to about 8 million.

For the Holodomor? Those estimates are bullshit.

seems to me you are a Stalinist as whenever somebody says something you don't like you call it bullshit. No evidence provided just "i don't think that so it is bullshit". So you have personally counted all the dead body's then? found every burial pit and cemetery where the victims are buried? dug up the whole of the Ukraine and dated the bodies found?

[Trotskylvania]

No, Rummel is an idiot who ignores the most elementary demographic evidence, which has all come to light since the fall of the Soviet Union. Evidence which academically honest reactionaries like Conquest used to revise down their estimates of excess deaths in the Soviet Union.

Yes, and I am sure you can source that.

Robert Conquest, Preface, The Great Terror: A Reassessment: 40th Anniversary Edition, Oxford University Press, USA, 2007. p. xviii

Robert Gellately. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf, 2007 ISBN 1-4000-4005-1 p. 584: "More recent estimations of the Soviet-on-Soviet killing have been more 'modest' and range between ten and twenty million."