Ask a Red, Second Edition

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Anyone who considers the Nazis even vaguely socialists after the Night of the Long Knives and the purge of the Strasserites and Rhom is probably not the best person to be asking those questions.
Yes, Nazism was 'National Socialism', but North Korea is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, but nobody is going to include them under a list of 'atrocities comitted by democracies'. In the same vein, you shouldn't include the Nazis on a list of 'socialist atrocities'.
To be fair, his question was why did they call themselves socialists, and the answer is that National Socialist was a combination of two very fluffy words that were nice enough to attract people, and vague enough to put very few of them off.
 
Because virtually every political movement in the 20th century described itself as socialist at one point or another. It was what the kewl kids were doing.
You will notice that very few of the worst human rights offenders of the 19th century described themselves as "socialist"

So maybe the kewl kids will always come up with something to call the ideal society but nothing really changes?
 
So maybe the kewl kids will always come up with something to call the ideal society but nothing really changes?
Actually, many of those movements were explicitly anti-idealist. "Socialist" in the early 20th century amounted to nothing more then a vague notion of being opposed to the existing order. In the latter half of the 20th century, it meant nothing more then a vague notion of being opposed to the American order of things, except in Europe where it meant being for the existing order of things.
 
Actually, many of those movements were explicitly anti-idealist. "Socialist" in the early 20th century amounted to nothing more then a vague notion of being opposed to the existing order. In the latter half of the 20th century, it meant nothing more then a vague notion of being opposed to the American order of things, except in Europe where it meant being for the existing order of things.

Did it ever amount to anything other than a vague notion?
 
Including some attrocities?

Clearly, you have something against socialism. So why even bother asking these questions? You know that no one is going to convince you that socialism and atrocities are not inherently linked or that socialism is not empty or bad no matter what is said. So the best thing for you to do would be to cease posting in this thread until you decide not to simply post to get a reaction. Don't pollute a long-running question-and-answer thread containing a lot of good information.

Moderator Action: See infraction below.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
 
Clearly, you have something against socialism. So why even bother asking the question? You know that no one is going to convince you that socialism and atrocities are not inherently linked no matter what is said. So the best thing for you to do would be to cease posting in this thread until you decide not to simply post to get a reaction. Don't pollute a long-running question-and-answer thread containing a lot of good information.

So socialism and attrocities are not inherently linked but capitalism and attrocities are? How do you figure that?
 
So socialism and attrocities are not inherently linked but capitalism and attrocities are? How do you figure that?

Who the hell said that? Even if somebody did at one point say that, I don't see how that has any bearing on the inherent link between socialism and atrocities, so you're better off starting another thread for it. But I guess bringing in some context would be a start.

As I said, stop posting just to get a reaction. Come up with quality responses with quotes and evidence or leave.

Moderator Action: It's not your place to tell people to leave the thread. If you have a problem with a post, report it. And don't accuse others of trolling. If you think they are posting just to get a reaction, then report them, don't attack them.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
 
Go start a thread on capitalism and atrocities.
 
Moderator Action: Enough bickering. Remember, this is the 'Ask a Red' thread, not the 'debate with a Red' thread. And if you don't want to answer a specific question, then just leave it.
 
This was asked within the last three pages.
To be fair, I think that Gary Childress is asking a question of somewhat more nuance than Celtic Empire's accusatory demands, so I'll address it anyway.

Why is it that some of the worst human rights offenders of the 20th century have been self described "Socialist" nations? Stalin, Pol Pot, even Nazi Germany called itself "National Socialist". Granted, there have been many self described non-socialist countries involved in various attrocities but so called socialist ones don't seem to be any great exception.
Well, firstly, I'd advise being more careful about how the word "socialist" is interpreted. The Nazis used the term, yes, but they were also in practice and largely in word anti-socialist; the term had populist value, and their use was in the tradition of similar (albeit more passing) appropriations by Louis Napoleon and Bismarck. The National Socialist German Workers Party, it can be fairly conclusively said, was a fascist* party, not a socialist one, and the two are rather by definition mutually exclusive.

[*"Small-f fascist", which is to say, an ultra-nationalist mass-movement of the petty bourgeois with anti-communist and palingenetic fixations, as opposed to "capital-F Fascism", which would be the Anglicisation of Italian Fascismo and those ideologies derived directly from it, such as Spanish Falangism.]


To address the central content of the question, I would say that this is simply a product of the fact that a significant number of authoritarian regimes existed in the twentieth century that claimed some ideological descent from Marx- sometimes tenuously, and for blatantly geopolitical reasons, as in the case of Fidel "Never Finished The Communist Manifesto" Castro's regime- and involved themselves in the repression and, on occasion, atrocities which you expect from such regimes. If you're asking why so many of these regimes aligned themselves with Marxism-Leninism, then I'm afraid I can't give you a comprehensive answer, but I can detail two major points: firstly, the constitution of the Soviet Union as a class society, and, secondly, the role of Marxism-Leninism in anti-colonial struggles.

Firstly, the USSR as a class society: During the Russian Revolution, the seizure of both land by the peasants and industrial production by the urban workers lead to the overthrow of the old social order which had existed under the Tsar and (albeit already undergoing reform) the Provisional government. However, the collapse of the organs of direct workers power- the soviets (municipal assemblies) and the zavkom and fabkom (factory committees in heavy and medium/light manufacturing, respectively) meant that economic control was increasingly placed in the hands of Bolshevik party-state functionaries and organised on a basis of commodity production (albeit sometimes within a partially planned economy) and of wage labour, preventing the reconstitution of society in a truly democratic fashion, which is to say, towards communism. (Whether this was a necessity of the war or a Bolshevik grab at power is a venerable debate that does not re-iterating here.) In Marxist terms, what this means is that while the social order was over turned, the basic social relations of society- between capital and labour- were retained, and the social formation was in its most fundamental sense unaltered. (A long, detailed, and boring-to-anyone-who-isn't-a-Marxist discussion of the subject of Soviet capitalism in economic terms can be found here, for those who wish to at least give it a browse and confirm that I'm not pulling all of this out of my ass.)
The sum of all this was that the Soviet Union was left in a sort of "manager's socialism", neither capitalism of the traditional privately-managed sort, but not a true "workers' socialism"; all the more so after then New Economic Plan was introduced, which Lenin himself described as a mere "state capitalism" and a step backwards onto firmer ground in wait for the belated international revolution. This left the Bolsheviks in an awkward political position, pushing neither forward towards revolutionary communism, or backwards towards a more traditional capitalism (a move which would have resembled the Old Bolshevik demand for "radical democratic republics" preceding the actual overthrow of capitalism), which, as you may expect, generated certain fractures within the party. Skipping over the sordid details of these intra-party struggles, it is sufficient to say that by the late 1920s, the Stalin party, a faction rooted in the emergent bureaucratic elite of the Bolshevik party-state apparatus, the "nomenklatura", had emerged as the dominant social force. This was in practice a settlement in favour of capitalism, but capitalism of a state-centred form- a purer "state capitalism" than Lenin's conception of the NEP- in which the bureaucratic elite acted as a collective capitalist class, a stock-holding board of directors in a corporation-state (or, in practice, a cartel of corporations extremely heavily tied to the state). Thus, the bourgeois state was revived under a red flag, under a heavy bureaucracy, and under a fetishistic image of "central planning" that, in practice, was no more of a departure from capitalism than the wartime quasi-planned economies adopted by the Western states during the Second World War. Combined with a level of centralised authority originally accumulated in a quasi-Jacobin manner by the Bolshevik government of the Civil War period, and expanded and heightened under Stalin, class rule became a violent reality to a far greater extent in the Soviet than anywhere else in the Western world outside of the fascist states, as the regime both accumulated capital- through the seizure of peasant lands and the rapid process of industrialisation- and suppressed working class resistance.
All this meant that the Soviet Union was passing on to its political imitators- and not least those which it went about establishing itself- a political order that was still essentially capitalistic, still essentially class-based, and so in which a state power, now unaccountable to the masses, suppressed them and all their attempts to depart from state power, whether towards more market-orientated ends (as in the suppression of the 1954 Hungarian Uprising) or towards more radical, communist-democratic ends (as in the suppression of various anti-Maoist workers councils and communes during the Cultural Revolution). When this is realised, the fact that these regimes varied from a vaguely benevolent oligarchy at best (as in Yugoslavia) to a raging terrorist-state (as in Cambodia) is not actually contradictory with the Marxist understanding of socialism or communism.

However, that only accounts for the existence of such regimes in the fUSSR, and in those areas under its direct influence (Mongolia, North Korea, and Central/Eastern Europe), but not to many of the independently or partially-independently established regimes across the globe. Hence the second point, anti-colonial struggles.
Put simply (and hopefully more briefly), this comes down to the fact that in many countries, most notably China and Vietnam, the Communists were consistently able to pose themselves as the more authentic force of national liberation than the Nationalists (in the general sense of pro-capitalist nationalists; the opposing sides found their classic expression in the CPC-KMT war). This is largely due to the class composition of the Communist movements, which is to say, primarily based in the peasantry, and with a leadership comprised mostly of middle-class intellectuals (although often with relatively few of the urban working class who were, supposedly, their primary revolutionary subject), which allowed them to remove themselves from the web of colonial capitalism that the Nationalists, finding their most significant support among the native capitalists, were trapped in this. This was in part because they were not innately embedded in old-style capitalism, but also because they naturally aligned themselves with the USSR (or in some later cases, with China against the USSR), which in most of these colonial areas had surprisingly limited neo-colonial ambition, instead seeking the achievement of geopolitical ends which it was willing to pay very good money to see achieved, granting the Communists a not insignificant degree of operational independence. This effectively allowed the Communists to pose themselves as a movement "of the people", embodying the popular and thus national will, in opposition to the "elitist" Nationalists, who often favoured collaboration with the West, if not turning to effective compradorism. (However, it should be noted that there were "middle-grounds", such as Nasser's "Arab socialism", which entailed a highly-interventionist state, but one which did not purport to dictate all economic activity, and largely left those areas outside of the "commanding heights of industry" in private hands; the triumph of any given Communist Party- indeed, its emergence as a major political force- is tied to the specific history of that country, which obviously cannot be elaborated on here.)

And even that is insufficient to give a full explanation, but, as I'm sure the length of this post reflects, that's in a large part because of the complexity of the topic, and so the difficulty of actually giving fully comprehensive answers to certain questions, so I hope that you'll forgive on that.

Edit: And I see that while I was up to that, everyone else has been at each others throats. Ho hum. :crazyeye:

What is so great about socialism? Why should we seek it?
Socialism, which in the Marxist sense is interchangeable with "communism" (either entirely, as in Left-Communism, or with the "lower stage of communism", as in Leninism), represents the reclamation of labour as a social process, simultaneously ending the exploitation of labour by a property-owning elite, ending the exploitation that necessarily accompanies that exploitative process, and by ending the alienating social conditions which that process produces. I give a more detailed summary of these criticisms of capitalism in this thread.
 
However, that only accounts for the existence of such regimes in the fUSSR, and in those areas under its direct influence (Mongolia, North Korea, and Central/Eastern Europe),
Actually in the case of North Korea its even simpler. Kim Il-Sung was a political descendent of the Tonghaks, and some time in the 30s and 40s found out to be a communist was to be opposed to the Japanese, so he decided he was a communist.
 
Actually in the case of North Korea its even simpler. Kim Il-Sung was a political descendent of the Tonghaks, and some time in the 30s and 40s found out to be a communist was to be opposed to the Japanese, so he decided he was a communist.
Ha! Never underestimate the power of the Kims to take the already generous standards of Stalinism and find a way to sink them even lower... :lol:
 
To be fair, I think that Gary Childress is asking a question of somewhat more nuance than Celtic Empire's accusatory demands, so I'll address it anyway.


Well, firstly, I'd advise being more careful about how the word "socialist" is interpreted. The Nazis used the term, yes, but they were also in practice and largely in word anti-socialist; the term had populist value, and their use was in the tradition of similar (albeit more passing) appropriations by Louis Napoleon and Bismarck. The National Socialist German Workers Party, it can be fairly conclusively said, was a fascist* party, not a socialist one, and the two are rather by definition mutually exclusive.

[*"Small-f fascist", which is to say, an ultra-nationalist mass-movement of the petty bourgeois with anti-communist and palingenetic fixations, as opposed to "capital-F Fascism", which would be the Anglicisation of Italian Fascismo and those ideologies derived directly from it, such as Spanish Falangism.]


To address the central content of the question, I would say that this is simply a product of the fact that a significant number of authoritarian regimes existed in the twentieth century that claimed some ideological descent from Marx- sometimes tenuously, and for blatantly geopolitical reasons, as in the case of Fidel "Never Finished The Communist Manifesto" Castro's regime- and involved themselves in the repression and, on occasion, atrocities which you expect from such regimes. If you're asking why so many of these regimes aligned themselves with Marxism-Leninism, then I'm afraid I can't give you a comprehensive answer, but I can detail two major points: firstly, the constitution of the Soviet Union as a class society, and, secondly, the role of Marxism-Leninism in anti-colonial struggles.

Firstly, the USSR as a class society: During the Russian Revolution, the seizure of both land by the peasants and industrial production by the urban workers lead to the overthrow of the old social order which had existed under the Tsar and (albeit already undergoing reform) the Provisional government. However, the collapse of the organs of direct workers power- the soviets (municipal assemblies) and the zavkom and fabkom (factory committees in heavy and medium/light manufacturing, respectively) mean that economic control was increasingly placed in the hands of Bolshevik party-state functionaries (who were usually controlled only indirectly by the workers, if at all), preventing the reconstitution of society in a truly democratic fashion, which is to say, towards communism. (Whether this was a necessity of the war or a Bolshevik grab at power is a venerable debate that does not re-iterating here.) In Marxist terms, what this means is that while the social order was over turned, the basic social relations of society- between capital and labour- were retained, and the social formation was in its most fundamental sense unaltered. (A long, detailed, and boring-to-anyone-who-isn't-a-Marxist discussion of the subject of Soviet capitalism in economic terms can be found here, for those who wish to at least give it a browse and confirm that I'm not pulling all of this out of my ass.)
The sum of all this was that the Soviet Union was left in a sort of "manager's socialism", neither capitalism of the traditional privately-managed sort, but not a true "workers' socialism"; all the more so after then New Economic Plan was introduced, which Lenin himself described as a mere "state capitalism" and a step backwards onto firmer ground in wait for the belated international revolution. This left the Bolsheviks in an awkward political position, pushing neither forward towards revolutionary communism, or backwards towards a more traditional capitalism (a move which would have resembled the Old Bolshevik demand for "radical democratic republics" preceding the actual overthrow of capitalism), which, as you may expect, generated certain fractures within the party. Skipping over the sordid details of these intra-party struggles, it is sufficient to say that by the late 1920s, the Stalin party, a faction rooted in the emergent bureaucratic elite of the Bolshevik party-state apparatus, the "nomenklatura", had emerged as the dominant social force. This was in practice a settlement in favour of capitalism, but capitalism of a state-centred form- a purer "state capitalism" than Lenin's conception of the NEP- in which the bureaucratic elite acted as a collective capitalist class, a stock-holding board of directors in a corporation-state (or, in practice, a cartel of corporations extremely heavily tied to the state). Thus, the bourgeois state was revived under a red flag, under a heavy bureaucracy, and under a fetishistic image of "central planning" that, in practice, was no more of a departure from capitalism than the wartime quasi-planned economies adopted by the Western states during the Second World War. Combined with a level of centralised authority originally accumulated in a quasi-Jacobin manner by the Bolshevik government of the civil period, and furthered and heightened under Stalin, class rule became a violent reality to a far greater extent in the Soviet than anywhere else in the Western world outside of the fascist states, as the regime both accumulated capital- through the seizure of peasant lands and the rapid process of industrialisation- and suppressed working class resistance.
All this meant that the Soviet Union was passing on to its political imitators- and not least those which it went about establishing itself- a political order that was still essentially capitalistic, still essentially class-based, and so in which a state power, now unaccountable to the masses, suppressed them and all their attempts to depart from state power, whether towards more market-orientated ends (as in the suppression of the 1954 Hungarian Uprising) or towards more radical, communist-democratic ends (as in the suppression of various anti-Maoist workers councils and communes during the Cultural Revolution). When this is realised, the fact that these regimes varied from a vaguely benevolent oligarchy at best (as in Yugoslavia) to a raging terrorist-state (as in Cambodia) is not actually contradictory with the Marxist understanding of socialism or communism.

However, that only accounts for the existence of such regimes in the fUSSR, and in those areas under its direct influence (Mongolia, North Korea, and Central/Eastern Europe), but not to many of the independently or partially-independently established regimes across the globe. Hence the second point, anti-colonial struggles.
Put simply (and hopefully more briefly), this comes down to the fact that in many countries, most notably China and Vietnam, the Communists were consistently able to pose themselves as the more authentic force of national liberation than the Nationalists (in the general sense of pro-capitalist nationalists; the opposing sides found their classic expression in the CPC-KMT war). This is largely due to the class composition of the Communist movements, which is to say, primarily based in the peasantry, and with a leadership comprised mostly of middle-class intellectuals (although often with relatively few of the urban working class who were, supposedly, their primary revolutionary subject), which allowed them to remove themselves from the web of colonial capitalism that the Nationalists, finding their most significant support among the native capitalists, were trapped in this. This was in part because they were not innately embedded in old-style capitalism, but also because they naturally aligned themselves with the USSR (or in some later cases, with China against the USSR), which in most of these colonial areas had surprisingly limited neo-colonial ambition, instead seeking the achievement of geopolitical ends which it was willing to pay very good money to see achieved, granting the Communists a not insignificant degree of operational independence. This effectively allowed the Communists to pose themselves as a movement "of the people", embodying the popular and thus national will, in opposition to the "elitist" Nationalists, who often favoured collaboration with the West, if not turning to effective compradorism. (However, it should be noted that there were "middle-grounds", such as Nasser's "Arab socialism", which entailed a highly-interventionist state, but one which did not purport to dictate all economic activity, and largely left those areas outside of the "commanding heights of industry" in private hands; the triumph of any given Communist Party- indeed, its emergence as a major political force- is tied to the specific history of that country, which obviously cannot be elaborated on here.)

And even that is insufficient to give a full explanation, but, as I'm sure the length of this post reflects, that's in a large part because of the complexity of the topic, and so the difficulty of actually giving fully comprehensive answers to certain questions, so I hope that you'll forgive on that.

Edit: And I see that while I was up to that, everyone else has been at each others throats. Ho hum. :crazyeye:

So in the final analysis is it fair to sum up the post above saying that the socialist states which engaged in attrocities were not really "socialist"? And if they were not, then what is socialism and to what degree did countries like the USSR achieve or not achieve it? Some claim that there has never been a true "capitalist" country on earth and that therefore one cannot blame evils on capitalism.

So lets say 100 years from now we try everything we can possibly think of or get to run and never end up with a functioning socialism? Instead we end up with more attrocities or scandal. Do we still pursue socialism with the slogan that socialism has never been tried?
 
Socialism, which in the Marxist sense is interchangeable with "communism" (either entirely, as in Left-Communism, or with the "lower stage of communism", as in Leninism), represents the reclamation of labour as a social process, simultaneously ending the exploitation of labour by a property-owning elite, ending the exploitation that necessarily accompanies that exploitative process, and by ending the alienating social conditions which that process produces. I give a more detailed summary of these criticisms of capitalism in this thread.

What makes "exploitation" an evil thing? I've lived in a "capitalist" society (or something similar) for years and have learned to cope quite well. I don't mind people giving me orders or getting paid less than maybe the quality of my labor is worth. I get along regardless. I dont' live beyond my means. I don't find myself in want. I really want very little. I play by the rules of the road and things work. Yes I get agrivated sometimes. Yes work stressed me out at times. But are you suggesting that socialism will eliminate all stress and aggrivation? I mean saying "exploitation is evil" is maybe like telling an ant that he's being oppressed by the queen ant. It's just what ants do and it maybe doesn't make much sense to think that. In fact if an ant followed your advice and went against the queen it would most likely end up in disaster for everyone involved. What is to say that contemporary society (whether we call it "capitalist" or "socialist" or whatever) is not like that? Perhaps it is that when we try to take that ant out of the context of his world, and introduce him to a "better" one we end up with Pol Pot or Stalin instead?
 
So in the final analysis is it fair to sum up the post above saying that the socialist states which engaged in attrocities were not really "socialist"? And if they were not, then what is socialism and to what degree did countries like the USSR achieve or not achieve it? Some claim that there has never been a true "capitalist" country on earth and that therefore one cannot blame evils on capitalism.
Well, setting aside the awkward word that is "socialism"- I have come to prefer the term "communism" in referring to the post-revolutionary society, as Marx did, because it eliminates the ambiguities- yes, it can be said that the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist states did not represent the fundamental social reconstitution which Marx predicted as the eventual culmination of class struggle under capitalism. That is a far deeper distinction than merely saying that they did not achieve "real" socialism.

So lets say 100 years from now we try everything we can possibly think of or get to run and never end up with a functioning socialism? Instead we end up with more attrocities or scandal. Do we still pursue socialism with the slogan that socialism has never been tried?
The very problem with "trying" socialism- or, more properly, communism- is that it isn't something which is "tried", as such, it is something which happens; it is generated in an organic fashion by the proletariat during a period of social reconstitution, rather than being constructed in a mechanical fashion by a party-state in the wake of a constitutional overhaul. The experience of communist revolution is in itself what forms communism; as Marx said, "for us, communism is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things".

What makes "exploitation" an evil thing? I've lived in a "capitalist" society (or something similar) for years and have learned to cope quite well. I don't mind people giving me orders or getting paid less than maybe the quality of my labor is worth. I get along regardless. I dont' live beyond my means. I don't find myself in want. I really want very little. I play by the rules of the road and things work. Yes I get agrivated sometimes. Yes work stressed me out at times. But are you suggesting that socialism will eliminate all stress and aggrivation? I mean saying "exploitation is evil" is maybe like telling an ant that he's being oppressed by the queen ant. It's just what ants do and it maybe doesn't make much sense to think that. In fact if an ant followed your advice and went against the queen it would most likely end up in disaster for everyone involved. What is to say that contemporary society (whether we call it "capitalist" or "socialist" or whatever) is not like that? Perhaps it is that when we try to take that ant out of the context of his world, and introduce him to a "better" one we end up with Pol Pot or Stalin instead?
I said that exploitation was detrimental to the human condition, not that it was "evil" in some absolute cosmic sense. That's a far more moralistic sort of criticism than Marxists should probably offer, and that I understand I have yet offered here.

Also, your comparison of the worker to an ant- a mindless drone subjugated by nature and necessity to a more powerful force- strikes me as rather anti-social. I'm not sure what I have to say about that.
 
Do you think that making unequal people equal wouldn't be detrimental to the human condition?
 
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