WTH? Are you even reading the same forum?
"Notice I was quoting someone who said "The good name of communism?", we are discussing opinions of communism, not communism itself."
"As for Russia, the way in which Lenin got into power has no bearing on the popularity of communism in Russia. The fact that communism was spread to Hungary and North Korea from outside of those countries has no bearing on whether or not the people inside those countries believed communism to be good."
I will repeat: noting that communism was orginally spread to a country from an outside source says nothing about what the people inside that country thought about communism. If Hungary had a popular communist revolution, that indicates that during that revolution, popular opinion was in support of communism. In other words, during those revolutions, communism had a good enough name that people wanted to support it, and there wasn't sufficient opposition to it to stop the revolution.
Here's what you said:
Oh right, Russia, Vietnam, China, Cuba, France, Hungary, North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Grenada, and Nicaragua, have all had popular communist revolutions because they thought communism was a bad thing!
Then later, after I challenged your statement, you said:
As for Russia, the way in which Lenin got into power has no bearing on the popularity of communism in Russia. The fact that communism was spread to Hungary and North Korea from outside of those countries has no bearing on whether or not the people inside those countries believed communism to be good.
So, in short, you argued that people in those countries must have supported Communism, since they had a popular Communist revolution. When I pointed out that that wasn't true, you said that the fact that they didn't have a popular Communist revolution doesn't prove anything. Do I need to spell out anymore how you're contradicting yourself?
If you had read half of what you claim, you would already know that's it's pointless to argue that Russia and China had communist revolutions.
Perhaps you just never got around to the second chapter?
You just read it for the first time last week, eh?
I'd agree that Russia did not experience a Communist revolution in the classical sense of the term. However, the people who got into power were communists, and what they did was prescribed by Communism.
Note that this says nothing about some elite bastards like Stalin or Mao falsely acting in the name of the proletariat, but literally, the proletariat. Literally, the proletariat taking the country for themselves, ruling it by themselves, and organizing it for their own benefit. The moment you throw a state in there, ruled by guys with suits and nice haircuts, you know it's not communism anymore.
But Marx himself posited the need for a transitional period during which the dictatorship of the proletariat would hold power and make "despotic inroads" into private property and the bourgeoisie. After a Marxist revolution, a country MUST have a state for a time, and this state MUST be authoritarian. This is straight from the horse's mouth, my friend. True, Marx claimed that when "Communism" was reached, the state would wither away. But before that could happen, Marx himself insisted that a powerful state must exist, in order to disarm the reactionary forces. This was the source of his disagreement with Bakunin, who desired the immediate and permanent abolition of the state above all. Marx disagreed, saying a temporary (strong) state was necessary. In reply to Marx, Bakunin made the following prophetic statement:
Bakunin said:
No dictatorship can have any other aim than to perpetuate itself.
As far as concerns this idea that Marx wanted to unite all the leftists, and that the inter-left fighting that went on among the Bolsheviks and others was against his ideas: history contradicts you. Marx was never the leader of a country, so we don't know if he would have instituted Stalin-esque purges or not. But he was the leader of the First International, and we can examine his tactics as the leader of that organization. And if you know much about the Hague Conference of 1872 and the events leading up to it, you'll know that he strongarmed, often through deceptive means, Bakunin and other anarchists out of the party because of ideological disagreements. Remember that the anarchists shared Marx's eventual goal (stateless, classless society) and his immediate goal (destruction of capitalism). They differed only in some of the intermediate steps (specifically, they were against setting up any kind of temporary state, whereas Marx felt that it was necessary). But Marx used strongarm tactics to expel them from the organization. Despite what Marx wrote in the Manifesto, his actions were in direct contradiction to his idealistic pronouncements.
Hmm, that kind of sticks a thorn in the "socialism in one country", doesn't it?
But Marx wasn't the end-all and be-all of Communism. Lenin's writings, in most cases, logically follow from Marx's, and many of Stalin's logically follow from Leninism.
Communism: No class distinctions (i.e. rulers, and the ruled, property owners and their slaves, kings and serfs, etc.), ergo no state which is distinguishable from the people themselves. If you can name a communist ruler, he wasn't a communist. The state itself is abolished, because the needs of the poor and the wage laborers transcend borders. If you can name a communist country, it wasn't communist.
But as I've shown, even Marx felt that a temporary state was necessary. Therefore, rulers of such a state are correct in calling themselves "Communists," because they are (supposedly) striving for Communism, even though they are still in the transitional "socialist" period.
And your last sentence is a great way that deluded modern-day Communists try to distance themselves from the various atrocities committed by the practitioners of their ideology. But if people are building, or trying to build, a Communist society, then they are Communists. A country that they rule "temporarily" can correctly be called a "Communist" country, despite their being in an intermediate stage, because Communism is the goal. The Soviet Union and Communist China (among others) can be correctly called Communist states, because they were attempting to build Communism. And thus, Communism must take reponsibility for the atrocities committed under those regimes.
. I will not, however, be taking a Tory defeat in Wales for granted, this time round.
