First off, the historical analysis is complex. It's a Western truism that all socialist and communist governing projects have completely failed.

However, without the Soviet Union, and perhaps without even Stalin, the situation could be a 1000 year Reich in Europe. At the same time, the intense price paid by the Soviet Union to defeat the Nazis may have been essentially a fatal blow, or significant contributing factor, resulting in its inevitable collapse. — boethius

Just looking back at this again and still trying to get a more clear picture of how the Maoist or Stalinist, or whichever other you wish to enter here, vision of communism differs from the original Marxist one, if it did.

In other words was their employment of it perverse or true to the letter of the original manifesto? If not what was different? So I am asking is it the implementation at fault in these case or is it a natural conclusion of communism on a larger scale? The detractors would surely want to claim the latter but I am trying to figure out if it is accurate or not.

Perhaps you could come back in to the fold as well @moliere?

^^^^^

I'm of the opinion that they are all reasonable evolutions of Marx. Rather than trying to defend the original vision of Marx as something which was intended to be more beautiful than it was I think they knew what they were doing and what happened is a legitimate result which has to be reckoned with in thinking about the philosophy.

For one, they all read the fuck out of Marx. And engaged in revolutionary programs which united the industrial working class, in the case of Lenin and Stalin, or the agricultural working class, in the case of Mao. The political parties built then proceeded to revolt against their respective governments for the purpose of obtaining the power which had been previously used against them, and succeeded at taking over the state.

That's pretty much the blueprint as Marx sets it out.

Now, "communism" isn't exactly what was achieved, but then that is supposed to be something which only comes about when all the classes have truly been abolished, so they were and are all still in that transition state. Notice, however, how the states didn't exactly whither away. So while that was the theory there might not be something entirely right with it.



Basically I prefer to study Marxism from the perspective of what Marxists have done, and not just on the basis of what Marx or Engels mean. You don't get an easy or pretty picture when you look at it like this.

So why bother?

Well, when you're that honest not only with the Marxist countries, but your own country, you'll find that none of the countries that are standing -- have won -- ever have pretty histories. States win by being more evil than the other states. We're familiar with the sins of Marxist states to dissuade us from their feasibility and accept that what we have now really is the best of all possible worlds, though it may be bad.

But they conveniently leave out the various sins that allowed us to establish capitalism, or the sins that it perpetuates.

The reason to bother is to look at what's true and what's false about what people say, and for the most part what's true is that all countries do evil, and what's false is that "this is the only feasible system" -- I prefer to look at political thoughts and actions from the expectation that there will be warts when we decided to look, and we have to accept the history of these various thoughts warts and all.

But they conveniently leave out the various sins that allowed us to establish capitalism, or the sins that it perpetuates. — Moliere

Oh yes I forgot that that was discussed earlier, the idea of capitalism/christianity being just as bloody or perhaps far more merely through having been around longer, than the little blots on history communist regimes have done so far.

So can it be said the end jusifies the means and that all states have blood on their hands but communism at least aims for a better end goal? In this interpretation Stalin and Mao were heroes?

In this interpretation Stalin and Mao were heroes? — unimportant

Yes.

Much like George Washington, especially with respect to Mao -- they both "relinquished" power.

US revolutionaries would poor molten metal into people's throats that agreed with the brits. They were not kind people. It was a revolution.

And yet we remember George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine....


Just like us in the US where the 1 dollar has George Washington's likeness, so do the Chinese printed currency have Mao's likeness.

So can it be said the end jusifies the means and that all states have blood on their hands but communism at least aims for a better end goal? — unimportant

That's been a common justification, yes. So it can be said.

I'm a little skeptical because it looks like what every government says: just keep on killing motherfucker, then peace will come.

Yes then one asks what difference are religious crusades from proletariat uprisings?

I suppose anarchism will also get down in the mud too? I seems they had a fair few bombings of choice adversaries to name but one instance.

Yes. All political philosophies which actually do something -- the point of politics -- get down in the mud.

I don't see why it necessarily has to be that though? What about the lead by example way of communes mentioned throughout this discussion?

Fair question.

It's not necessary necessary.

And if we can find ways to get along that don't include killing one another then that's a good example.

Usually we're not killing one another: that's another good example.

And yet.... if we look at what people call politics...

Just looking back at this again and still trying to get a more clear picture of how the Maoist or Stalinist, or whichever other you wish to enter here, vision of communism differs from the original Marxist one, if it did. — unimportant

As points out, it's fair to the post-Marx schools, even Stalinism and Maoism are reasonable evolutions of Marx's original theory.

When anti-communist propaganda is internalized and "West good" and "Soviet bad", then the West leftist beatnik apologetic response is that Stalin betrayed the true Marxism.

This framing depends entirely on the idea that state-policy-induced famines and genocides in the 1930 and 40s make your political system 100% discredited and the worst people to have ever lived, but genocides and state-policy-induced famines before 1930 and also after 1950 are perfectly understandable historical processes that say absolutely nothing about the fundamental merits of the political order, economic system and culture involved.

You can starve as many Irish to death as you want, kill as many natives all over the world, even run a brutal chattel slavery system for hundreds of years, as long as it was before 1930!!

People in the West are emotionally conditioned to have strong reactions to genocides, but only in this 20 year window, everything outside is basically meh, genocide shmemocide. Why there's a genocide on right now that the West is perfectly content with, as there's a simple algorithm to emotionally deal with it: check calendar, is it the 1930's or 40's? If no, then genocide is fine, probably even a good thing.

So, not to say the Soviet Union was great, but rather a fair look allows seeing both successes and failures (as any Western apologist will scream we must do to be fair if we're discussing the West's failing! Civilization! Civilization!) as well as how it made Marxist sense to the people who built the Soviet Union, including Stalin. Not to say Marx would agree if he were alive, just that, as @Moliere points out these people read Marx and saw themselves as extending Marx in a logical way.

To get to those extensions and developments of Marx, the problem Marxists had in the 20th century is that all the socialist (including anarchist) revolutions in the 19th century were crushed by adjacent imperial powers. The empires warred between themselves but recognized anti-rich sentiments was a common enemy so would easily unite to destroy any genuine socialist uprising and governance.

At the same time, these experiences in socialist uprising and governance demonstrated it was possible; people could overturn governments and could govern together in a new socialist way.

However, there was a global system of Imperialism and capitalism that would spring into action to crush any such socialist upstarting wherever it emerges on the globe, so in seeing this communists naturally started to think of how to solve this problem.

So, the new idea compared to Marx's original analysis, is various formulations of avant-gardism, where the idea is to take over a state and then garrison it against Imperial invasion and capitalist undermining.

Of course a strong militaristic state is in contradiction with the communist goal.

So it's easy to critique in theory that this obviously won't work. However, to take the point of view of these people, Tsarist Russia just killed and starved millions of Russians in a calamitous and incompetently managed war. China has endured "a century of humiliation" and the British pushing opioids on the Chinese (one potential explanation of why China isn't too worried about an opioid epidemic in the US right now). Western analysis of these issues always starts with the Soviet Revolution, Stalin takes control, or then Mao's cultural revolution.

Not to say I'm a huge fan of Stalin or Mao, they were both incredibly brutal, but no less brutal than the systems they replaced so when your learn the before and after, it makes a lot more sense how thing shake out. First, the previous systems were completely discredited in disastrous wars. Russian lines collapsed in WWI, the whole country mismanaged and hunger everywhere, and they only didn't "lose" because Germany also lost in turn against France and co.

When Russia withdrew from the war, ~2,500,000 Russian POWs were in German and Austrian hands. This by far exceeded the total number of prisoners of war (1,880,000) lost by the armies of Britain, France and Germany combined. Only the Austro-Hungarian Army, with 2,200,000 POWs, came even close.[131]

According to other data, the number of irretrievable losses in Russia ranges from 700,000[132] to 1,061,000.[133] Golovin wrote a huge work dedicated to the losses of Russians in World Wat I, he based on the documents of the headquarters and the documents of the German archive, working there together with German veterans, correlated the losses and came to the conclusion that the total losses are 7,917,000, including 1,300,000 dead, 4,200,000 wounded and 2,410,000 prisoners.[134] Later estimates have adjusted this number to 2,420,000 people.[135] Per Alexei Oleynikov total losses for the 1914–1917 campaigns look like this: — Eastern Front (World War I)

So things really aren't going well from the perspective of the average Russian.

In the case of China, the invasion of Japan was an incredibly brutal affair, for example:

According to Rummel, in China alone, from 1937 to 1945, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians, as a direct result of the Japanese operations — Japanese war crimes

So when you put into context what people are dealing with, you can start to empathize both with the idea that trying something new sounds like it can't possibly be worse as well as why the atrocities in their own right of these new systems "don't seem so bad". The Western presentation of events as everyone basically living an idyllic peaceful and suburban life style and then suddenly Stalin's in charge! The horror! Is somewhat less than accurate.

WWI and WWII are essentially apocalyptic events so any half coherent scheme to put society back together sounds worthwhile.

In contrast to Marx, he is building up his theory in a relatively peaceful Europe. Up until Napoleon, European powers competed outside of Europe for territory, resources and trade routes but had a sort of gentleman's agreement not to wage too much war on the European continent and trade instead.

There was no evidence at the time for what we would call today realpolitik (the European empires were all intermarried and part of the same in-group which mediated intra-European warfare) and as a short hand the later evolutions of Marx given the Napoleonic wars (a topsy turvy series of events in response to state-mismanagement and then socialist revolution) and then also WWI, are broadly speaking a realpolitik addition to Marx's analysis of capitalism.

I have begun reading some of the classic Marx/Engels texts and what I am finding is that they assume a high level of knowledge on the reader's part about capitalist economics.

Not as accessible as The Conquest of Bread, which has a bit of that but much lighter and more general.

↪boethius I have begun reading some of the classic Marx/Engels texts and what I am finding is that they assume a high level of knowledge on the reader's part about capitalist economics. — unimportant

Definitely things will be a lot clearer of what people are even talking about with reading the classic texts in a discipline. Highly recommended.

Partly Marx is addressing himself to other intellectuals who he assumes is familiar with all the texts he's familiar with, such as Ricardo and Hegel and he's using references and language and conceptual frameworks that Western intellectuals at the time would be familiar with; and partly there's a lot of words and concepts that everyone is familiar with at that time but now require more erudite historical knowledge to fully understand.

For example, everyone, for all intents and purposes, at the time Marx is writing are familiar with Lords and the bourgeoisie. The class distinctions were super obvious and people were very concerned with being identified with their class and their subgroup within their class.

Why analysts today still use the word bourgeoisie is first there's no good modern counter-part, as to say "upper class" is to include also aristocrats, but the whole point of the bourgeoisie is that they are rich but no aristocrats. So in modern language they are the 1% who aren't still actual kings and lords. King Charle's is part of the 1% but not bourgeoisie, likewise the pope is reasonable to say is part of the 1% but is not bourgeoisie.

Bourgeoisie also has more reference than just wealth (without being also still feudal), but there's a whole culture and world view that develops along with it: clothes, mannerisms, opinions, history, myth and so on; most importantly an ideology that optimizes their dominance that they can, through their dominance, push on the rest of the world; when very different cultures start to look "Western" what those cultural elements, world view and opinions actually are and come from are the Western bourgeoisie culture. There's obvious things like clothes and architecture, but more importantly is the way of thinking such as wealth always being caused by hard work (why wealth is deserved, and why the bourgeoisie should be in charge and not aristocrats who did not "earn their wealth"; i.e. wealth is always deserved except if you're an aristocrat, but even then only before the emergence of capitalism as since wealth is always deserved existing aristocrats, such as King Charles, "earn" their wealth through the hard work they do bringing in tourism, perfectly honest well deserved wealth of a modern hard working enterprising modern king; so that kind of obsession proving an anachronistic king in the contemporary age is economically justified, rather than even consider any theory of governance and justice and so on, is archetypical bourgeoisie sensibilities; the question of the effect of having a king on governance would not even occur in bourgeoisie culture as everything that exists under capitalism has an economic explanation and everything with an economic explanation is justified, except when they disagree of course, then it's a case of "it may work for them over there, but it wouldn't work for us here and there's an economic explanation, and thus justification, for both cases").

Partly Marx is addressing himself to other intellectuals who he assumes is familiar with all the texts he's familiar with, such as Ricardo and Hegel and he's using references and language and conceptual frameworks that Western intellectuals at the time would be familiar with; and partly there's a lot of words and concepts that everyone is familiar with at that time but now require more erudite historical knowledge to fully understand. — boethius

Yes good point. I had actually been reading some of the creative writing classics of that era, before this interest in political philosophy took my fancy. Ones like Jane Eyre and Around the World in 80 Days. I have liked Victorian era writing for a long time because of its rich language and my recent re-acquaintance with it reminded me of that.

As you note, many of the terms which seem esoteric today would have been commonplace then and I noticed quite a few come up between writers. Not just the words themselves but the roles of men and women as good examples and the casual misogyny or racism or classism which would be offensive today. Particularly the classism in Jane Eyre. I thought it hilarious when she writes of teaching working class people as 'gaping mouth rustics' without a hint of irony, more as a matter of fact statement.

Why analysts today still use the word bourgeoisie is first there's no good modern counter-part, as to say "upper class" is to include also aristocrats, but the whole point of the bourgeoisie is that they are rich but no aristocrats. So in modern language they are the 1% who aren't still actual kings and lords. King Charle's is part of the 1% but not bourgeoisie, likewise the pope is reasonable to say is part of the 1% but is not bourgeoisie.

Aren't the bourgeoisie just the middle class today?

Aren't the bourgeoisie just the middle class today? — unimportant

No.

The bourgeoisie are the owners of the means of production -- the workplace.

The boss you deal with is "middle class" in the sense that they're in the middle and make enough money to not suffer and are mostly aligned with bourgeois interests due to that.

But the owners of the workplace are the bourgeoisie. Not the owners of a home who peddle its ideology in the workplace, but the bona-fide owners (and perhaps movers and shakers at a certain level) who make decisions about the economy and how workers will conduct their business because they have purchased their labor.

We touched on the police earlier and how they enforce the mores of capitalism.

I got to thinking about another huge and insidious force that does the same which is the medical establishment.

How many behaviors are pathologized simply because the individual does not fit in to the mould of conforming to capitalist society? I would say a large amount of so called mental illness is just propagandized capilalist rhetoric.

The most poignant creative work to deal with this subject matter that comes to mind would be One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest but so many lesser cases where doctors give pills to fix the symptom behavior with nebulous diagnoses like anxiety and depression when capitalism is the root cause which is never addressed.

The medical establishment, I would posit, is in large part enabling the system and medicates citizens only with the intent to keep them producing. So the goal is not to heal the patient but rather to keep them productive.

As with policing, the objective is always maintaining the capitalist status quo.

Discuss.

No one taking this up? ?

It should be a new discussion. It doesn't belong in this one.

Sure I just thought there have already been tangents of a similar or greater magnitude.

I get criticized on other forums for 'spamming' too many topics rather than keeping to one thread so was also conscious of that.

I agree with @Jamal, tho I didn't reply cuz it's a big question to address -- it's interesting and good, but not easy to answer on many levels: mostly cuz there's the part I agree with and the part I disagree with, but this being a philosophy forum I'd have to specify why and which way. Further the question requires a lot of knowledge to give a good faith answer: both in Marxism and in modern psychiatric practice which complicates my ability to give good answers to the "why" question.

It's something I've thought about and heard before: My short opinion is that they're not related exactly, tho I hear bosses use the language of therapists to get people to do what they want so there is something creepy going on.