Stalin and Trotsky were both members of the communist revolution, and strong supporters of Leninism. Stalin was a communist, and spent the great deal of his early dictatorship (yes, he was a dictator, all the commie leaders were to a degree, thats the only way they could hold power) implementing collectivist economic planning and policies. He later went crazy (repeatedly), but many think that has more to do with the death of his wife than a lack of faith in Communism.
Lenin himself disliked Stalin; in his testament, he recommended to remove Stalin from all his party posts.
Yes, Trotsky was Lenin’s boy. And in truth, would have been far more dangerous to the West. Stalin was always held back by his inability to trust his subordinates or to allow his army to establish strong chains of command. His paranoia and his insanity made him dangerous, but also limited his ability to make good on the threat of that danger.
Research the term “permatemp” sometime. Bill isn’t as benign as some are led to believe.
Zwald: therein lies one of the problems with this system and advocating it: since it’s supposed to not just be fairer but economically and psychologically superior, people shouldn’t want to backslide. Unless, of course, the workers never really had their revolution, but had the “revolution” forced upon them.
Welcome to Russia.
Kirkland Depends on whether we’re talking about “communism” as it is defined by its critics (which has an extremely wide interpretation) or Marxism (which is a fairly narrow subset of “communism”). Stalin may possibly have been a communist, but he was no Marxist, and probably cared far more about personal power and personal control than actually carrying out that vaunted transition from capitalism to socialism to communism.
Then again, maybe Trotsky wouldn’t have been much better at the helm. Presiding over an unstable system can’t be fun.
RE: permatemps.
I’ve worked as a contracter at Microsoft, and I can tell you and much much rather contract than be a Full-time employee. Why? Contractors get paid by the hour, with time and half after 40 hours. FTEs get salary and (currently) worthless stock options. When you are working 60+ hours a week time and half looks like a pretty sweet deal, compared to the suckers who get nothing.
Contractors do get benefits, but from the contracting agency.
Point taken. Still, would you consider Microsoft employees to be oppressed workers? You know, in a Dickensian sense? Are their children hungry?
BTW, the OP has not been seen in a while. I wonder what happened to him. It was kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. 
He’s young sailor and thereby a fluid mind, he’s already forgoten about Communism (I pray)…you know how it was!
Was Lenin a communist? Lenin was responsible for millions of deaths himself. The first famines and abuses under collectivization occured on his watch, as well as did a number of brutal purges and persecutions. You might want to search the archives for a thread in which we documented Lenin’s horrors in detail.
I wrote this for another thread, but decided that it fit better here. Enjoy.
One problem with the Soviet system involved information processing, as Sam has noted. (They hoped that large computers might solve that one.)
Another problem was that it was difficult to set up incentives so that (say) farmers would have an incentive to sit up with their sick cows at 3AM. In other words, it is difficult to dictate initiative from high up.
A third problem was their rather simple legal system, along with low incentives to maintain property.
At the same time, the Eastern Bloc delivered a higher standard of living than much of the third world, so it can’t be said that their system, “didn’t work”. It just didn’t work particularly well. Furthermore, the USSR was able to raise its level of development, albeit with a heavy reliance on forced savings.*
One of the advantages of the Soviet system was that their propaganda system was monopolized by the government and was therefore less efficient. In a market system, we have surplus flim-flam as reflected in marketing departments and advertising agencies.
- Not to mention forced labor. Except that I suspect the former was more significant.
I am a Marxist. Communism, as I take it, was not the system employed by people like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Kim, Castro, etc. etc. etc. It has never existed anywhere, because of fundamental problems in Leninism and its offshoots.
The Soviet Union never really became communist for a few reasons. Firstly, Lenin led a vanguard party. Instead of the class consciousness Marx and Engels said the working class as a whole needed to achieve themselves, Lenin told his followers what he thought communism was and they followed suit. He himself said it would take the proletariat 500 years to realize its situation entirely.
Secondly, and arguably more importantly, the Soviet Union had not experienced capitalism. It still had a feudalesque economy. In the Marxian dialectic, capitalism must precede communism. Marx and Engels correctly predicted that capitalism would become a global economy, which it undoubtedly is today. A while after that, they said, the proletariat would be ripe for revolution.
Thirdly, communism is not possible in a single country. A country in modern times cannot be self-sufficient – so a so-called “communist” state must trade with capitalist states and thus work with the capitalist trade system. Capitalism, as a world economy, must be replaced with a world economy. A single “communist” state would eventually have capitalism forced back on them – as seems to be imminent in China, Cuba, etc.
The USSR obviously did not meet the Marxian view of communism. For one, Engels said that when the bourgeoisie was ousted from power, the state would wither away. The Soviet state did not wither away; it became stronger, acquiring dictatorial powers over the people.
There were still “classes” in the Soviet Union. Party members were given advantages over non-members; Stalin was certainly much better off than the average factory worker in Vladivostok.
Private property was not eliminated in Russia. After all, people still carried around rubles.
In communism (at least the way I see it), freedom of speech, democracy, the absence of money and leadership, and the abolition of prides and prejudices like nationalism, racism, homophobia, etc. are vital.
As for human nature, it is absurd to assume that communism is somehow made impossible by our genes. People respond to their environment and changes within it, not to some subconscious need to be greedy. People’s behaviors are very heavily dependent on their surroundings. A child born in Qatar is likely to become a Moslem, unlike someone in, say, Vanuatu.
I believe that there is no inherent greed in man; it is acquired from the materialist society around him. And even then it’s not a universally applied trait. People donate to charities and do volunteer work, after all.
As mentioned in the FAQ of the World Socialist movement:
Note that socialism here is the same thing as communism. Also note that I do not agree with all of the ideas of the World Socialist movement, but that explanation expresses my beliefs pretty well.
Propertyless societies have existed, by the way. In footnote 2 of Section I of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Friedrich Engels states:
Finally, a post to which my signature is appropriate! If you’re wondering, it’s the last line of the Communist Manifesto in German.
**
Do not feed the troll.
Let the collective do it.
Allow me to correct myself. By “propertyless societies” I mean societies without private property, preferring communal property instead.
whoa. And a real Marxist weighs in.
Stone: Further to Palve’s comments, it’s important, IMO, to ask whether or not Lenin was acting on behalf of what he thought was a greater good. I doubt Palve (or any Marxist) would argue that the revolution is bloodless… no revolution is. Even if his revolution was ultimately fruitless and tragic, Lenin could have believed he was “doing the right thing” and should perhaps be judged in that fashion.
And that’s exactly what’s wrong with Communism - or any other system that isn’t fundamentally grounded in individual rights, including the right to keep the things you make. Because invariably what happens is that some people don’t go along with the great Marxist revolution, and then it just becomes too easy to compel them with force or kill them. You’ve gotta break a few eggs, you know?
And then you have these nasty Kulaks, who hoard all the resources and run the farms. And what do you know - they won’t play ball. So exterminate them, all in the name of communism.
Then when famine hits, you notice that the Church has a lot of money that you could use. So the Church goes on the enemy list, and you can liquidate them and plunder their treasure. After all, it’s for the common good.
And then you discover that there are people within your party who are starting to question all the bloodshed, but hey, your cause is just, so have them purged.
Where does it stop? When every human on Earth toes the line?
And absent being able to pay overtime, how do you get the workers to work harder than other workers when a crisis comes? Appeal to their social conscience? What if that doesn’t work? Well, there’s always the threat of the gun…
A true Marxist looks at "Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Kim, Castro, etc. etc. etc. ", and concludes that our experience with them doesn’t count because they weren’t ‘true’ communists. But a skeptic might look at all of those people and conclude that they are the inevitable result of trying to implement communism. I see absolutely no evidence whatsoever that communism can work as a global system, and tons of evidence that any attempt to institute it rapidly devolves into oppression and terror.
Sam: as mentioned earlier, a true Marxist argues that the revolution (it it were to happen) would come from the bottom up, not the top down. The workers realize they’re getting screwed, that the “property rights” system only means that the fruits of their labour are being taken from them by capitalists who are using their own labour power to oppress them, that the defenses of private property (as our conception of private property rights didn’t come out of thin air, but were originally conceived at some point by specific political philosophers and theorists) are weak, and that frankly they’re sick of having their lives run (badly) by a few plutocrat bastards. So they take it back, and if they break a few eggs, so what? Capitalism has claimed its fair share of lives too. That can be justified on utilitarian grounds if it leads to the best outcomes overall, but the entire point of the Marxist critique was that it doesn’t, that there’s something better. I’m sure you’re aware of Machiavelli’s dictum that it’s best to have more cruelty immediately in exchange for much less cruelty later, and the communists thought that they were bringing about the “perfect system”.
He’d also probably argue that opportunists that use Marxist rhetoric to justify their autocratic regimes don’t count any more than opportunists that use anti-Marxist rhetoric, and Kissinger knows that South and Central America and Southeast Asia have seen plenty of both.
I know you keep on trying to find a hammerblow to say “and this is why communists are all murderous scum”, but it’s extremely difficult to seperate the contingent historical problems of the various regimes from the functional issues of the system itself, especially when the system itself is amorphous at best. The attempts at creating “socialist” states have been, as mentioned earlier, top-down instead of bottom-up, and have never actually taken place in the highly-industrialized countries that the early Marxists said would produce socialism. Hence the resillience of Marxism… the revolution that it actually prophesized hasn’t happened yet, just “wannabes”.
A skeptic looking at a system and dismissing the explanations and assumptions of the system is how this whole thing got started, whether you start it with Rousseau (whose opinion of the value of private property was dim at best) or with Marx. If laissez faire capitalism didn’t have its downsides, Marx would never have got anywhere. Unless, of course, one adheres to the notion that nobody has ever criticized capitalism unless they’re either lazy or jealous or ignorant. I’ll assume that nobody here is so naive.
The idea that “the more capitalism has advanced the closer communism is” is just plain silly. Or does someone believe the US is on the verge of turning communist? History shows us the opposite is true and once a country has a productive economy with a solid middle class the chances of that country turning to communism are zero.
It is interesting to note though that in China, part of the ideological justification for going capitalist is that it is a required step in the process for true communism. Anyone who believes that in 50 or 100 years time, when the Chinese people have a good standard of living, they are going to give it all up voluntarily for communism is dreaming.
Heck, when old uncle Mao decreed the collectivization of farms it instantly impoverished the country by a whole lot because the peasants, in their selfishnesh and lack of understanding of the revolution) would rather kill the cow and eat it than turn it over to the communes.
Anyone who thinks this system can work is just dreaming. Experience and common sense, both, tell us it does not work. You only have to look at young people sharing housing to know what I mean. More often than not, a small group sharing housing end up arguing and splitting. And this sytem is going to work worldwide? I don’t think so.
P.J. O’Rourke has a book called “Eat The Rich” that explores different economic systems. There’s a chapter about Sweden called “Good Socialism”. To make a long story short, Swedes pay ridiculous amounts of taxes but their government provides A LOT. What does Sweden’s example illustrate? That it can work? That it requires specific conditions to work? That it depends on the people in the system?
Greetings Palve.
So lets see. There never has been a communist/socialist society, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro et al were just frauds. Unless we have a global capitalist society then there is no hope of instituting a Marxist communist society.
OK, I’m with you so far. But doesn’t that mean that the best way to achieve a Marxist utopia is through the worldwide expansion of capitalism? All these Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist countries weren’t communist…in fact they were LESS progressive than capitalist countries, since they were essentially feudal in structure (ie, work or die, the “party” becomes the aristocracy, etc). Marx went on and on about the how capitalism uproots and destroys the old corrupt institutions of feudalism.
We aren’t even close to instituting true world-wide capitalism…look at Africa, China, India, the Middle East, barely touched by capitalism in a real sense. Oh, some resource extraction, but there is no such thing as capitalism there, at present.
All true Marxists should therefore–at least at this point in history–be doing everything they can to advance global capitalism. Start working for that Megacorporation. Start a bank. Start investing in the stock market. Karl Marx would be proud of you.
In essence, this is exactly why Marx supported colonialism. The world needed to be turned capitalist before it can be turned socialist (and then communist later). Since he thought that the revolution was coming RealSoonNow, though, he figured that all that needed to happen was that the proles figured out they were being had, and that “in the real world” they were better off on their own. Of course, the revolution didn’t come real soon, it was immediately obvious that his worldwide expansion of capitalism wasn’t happening anytime soon, and pretty much every big attempt at communism since then (including Lenin, Mao et al) has been an attempt to evade Marx.
This would probably explain why his ideas manage to survive, though. Think about it: as long as people think that true socialism will follow capitalism once it’s expanded as much as it can, they can say that any attempts up to this point have been “false starts” and can point at Marx to prove it. It’s somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which can only be truly disproven if something that isn’t socialism takes the place of capitalism. What the hell that would be I haven’t the foggiest.
In essence, though, you’re exactly right, and oddly enough the best place to start is making sure that the IMF and World Bank, institutions hated by Marxists, do everything in their power to turn as much of the world capitalist as possible.