This is one of those topics where it gets kind of tricky to figure out which forum to put it in. However, I am hoping for a factual answer with as little debate (religious, political or other) as possible.
I’ve never read Karl Marx or anything similar mainly on the off chance that some might label me a Communist which I am not. But I do have some questions on the Marx’s philosophy.
Generally, whenever an atheist, agnostic or whatever brings up the idea that Christian sects tend to not follow what they preach in terms of hatred and bigotry, someone always brings up Stalin and Mao and Castro and all, saying these atheists have been pretty bad too.
I’ve always been tempted to say that yeah, they are bad, but they didn’t directly contradicted the philosophy they’ve based their life upon. But I’ve never been sure of that. I don’t know if Marx ever wrote that there should be no bloodshed. That all governments should be peaceful, forgiving and loving.
I figure someone here must have read Marx and others like him and can give me a boiled down idea of what was put forth in those Communist writings.
Were Stalin, Mao and all the other Communist dictators violating Communism’s basic tenets?
Yes, since they didn’t really practice Communism as Marx envisaged it - for instance there should have been no entitled elites (nomenklatura). But "no bloodshed’ had nothing to do with that, I don’t believe Marx promised eternal peace before the global worker state arrived, anyway.
FWIW you shouldn’t avoid reading Marx for fear of being labelled a Communist - anyone so shallow should be avoided anyway.
In a nutshell, Marx believed that revolution was a necessary stage in the transition from capitalism to communism. I don’t think he ever, say, called for the execution of the Bourgeoisie, but neither did he shy away from the possibility or necessity of violence.
(The Communist Manifesto is a very short read, don’t be afraid to read it. And it is available on Project Guttenburg. Das Kapital, however, is only worth the slog if you’re really interested.)
According to Marx after communism was implemented the state would wither away and every one would be equal. Instead the state grew so much that it employed huge numbers of citizens to spy on each other and a few top members of the government lived like kings while the rest of society barely survived.
Marx is actually a great and powerful writer, and reading some of his work is certainly worth it. One argument for saying that the communist movement violates tenets of Marxism is that according to Marx the rise of the proletariat into revolution is the inevitable course of history. Marx is just describing the mechanisms underlying historical progress, which for him lie in material factors, the distribution of ownership of the means of production, and not, for instance, in ideas or enlightenment, like Hegel argues. Communism results when those forced to sell their labor power rise up and take ownership of the means of production away from the capitalists, who use capital to make more capital, and place it in the hands of the collective, so that everyone can benefit from it. This will happen naturally and is inevitable, so in a way Marx is not advocating but simply predicting - or so he would claim.
In reality, Marx spent a good part of his life creating a communist movement, a movement that he said would emerge naturally. The communist manifesto, published in the revolutionary year of 1848 with its famous call to arms ‘Proletarians of all lands, unite!’ was certainly part of Marx’s attempt to create a political movement, whereas for instance Das Kapital is really an attempt to describe the workings of capitalism in political, sociological, and economic terms in a way that was hitherto unprecedented and remains influential in social science to this day, for better or for worse. Incidentally, a large part of the project of Das Kapital is to describe historically how the class of proletarians, people who own nothing but their bodies’ labour power, came about in England: by forceful, violent, prolonged expropriation at the hands of the capitalists. Marx does not blame the capitalists for what they do, he admires them for creating something overwhelming and earth-shattering. But they will have to be replaced and he does not object to doing so violently since that is the way that history moves forward.
Lenin got sick of waiting for the revolution, and decided that he did not want to wait around for the proletariat to figure out its historical task, and that he would form the vanguard of socialism. This move is seen as a break from classical marxism to marxism-leninism - but it’s one that Marx’s own more political work easily allowed for.
It’s not much of an argument against Christianity to say that, in killing people, some of its adherents were going against the basic tenets of Christianity. In the same way, it is not much of an argument in favor of Marxism to say, “well sure, Stalin and Mao were the greatest mass murderers in history, but at least they were not hypocritical about it.” IYSWIM.
I think in both cases, people are objecting more to the killings than to the hypocrisy. The Nazis, for instance, were not violating their principles at all when they killed six million Jews. Just the opposite - that’s what Hitler intended all along. But that doesn’t make it any less an appalling historical crime.
But puddleglum is correct - the state was supposed to wither away after communism arose. Instead Stalin imposed totalitarianism.
Marx was a theorist. Lenin used his theory to put into action in Russia (which Marx thought to be one of the last places where his historical forces would take hold). It turned out that putting the theory into action required methods that Marx didn’t necessarily expect (but should have).
Stalin took it further. He was solely interested in gaining absolute power and the structure of the new Soviet Union gave him an ample opportunity to do so. He cleverly consolidated power, then used it ruthlessly.
They never pretended to have a communist system. The USSR, for example, explicitly called itself socialist and not communist. It’s my understanding that there was supposed to be a period of socialism before the withering away of the State into communism.
“someone always brings up Stalin and Mao and Castro and all, saying these atheists have been pretty bad too.”
If this is the real reason of your question, then draw a distinction between the Long Beards terrorist and the terrorists with long beards. That is, in one case the characteristic is a contingent characteristic of the violent group whereas in the other it is the impetus of the group’s violence. To blame Mao’s violence on atheism makes as much sense as blaming Hitler’s genocides on vegetarianism.
Now if the point someone was making is that religion is a necessary condition to large scale violence, then people who bring up Stalin and Mao have a point. It’s not a necessary condition in the least.
Reality Chuck,
It’s possible that Marx did not expect harsh methods in a socialist societyy but it’s doubtful. Marx seemed to think in terms of revolution in large part because of the French revolution which saw one class (the aristocracy) being displaced by another (the bourgeoisie) and he thought that process would go on to see the bourgeoisie replaced with the proletarians. The French revolution was quite violent and authoritarian with the French somehow winding up with an emperor. If Marx didn’t at least expect there to be a Robespierre-like leader, he was engaging in wishful thinking.
The usual arguments focus on the former. Usually someone is trying to claim the moral high ground based on religion. The godless heathen brings up the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and all that. The Bible thumper brings up Stalin and Mao. Yada, yada, Yoda…
Well it is worth considering whether the atrocities committed in the name of communism really served communism as an idea, or that they were an aberration. I would argue that Marx would have condoned a good bit of violence as part of the revolution, but his understanding of what a revolution would be and should be like is so different from what actually happened in Russia, the Soviet Union, or the Soviet Bloc, that his writings can hardly be held directly responsible for it. As others have stressed, the state was supposed to whither away, but instead it ballooned to vast proportions in what communists argue was the socialist stage preceding communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, but it is not really possible to justify this in Marxian terms on any reading of Marx’s works.
The ‘reasons’ for mass killings in the Soviet Union, such as they were, are hard to base in Marxist philosophy. The collectivization, or the purges of the CP, where not really things that Marx foresaw and could have prescribed, nor would he have done so if he could have. Some argue that any implementation of Marx’s writings would automatically lead to atrocities of the type seen under Stalin, even if Marx himself did not recognize or condone it. I am not sold on this idea. The causes of communist atrocities really have a lot more to do with the particularities of Russian history and state-society relations in particular, rather than with the nature of communist ideology. Which, ironically, confirms Marx’s point of view that ideas don’t really matter, they are superstructure, what matters is the division of power in a given situation.
If memory serves, Marx expected the revolution of the proletariat to take place in the societies where capitalism was farthest advanced, such as Germany and the UK. For the revolution to come instead from Russia, which was still largely agrarian and (in Marxist terms) feudal, was unexpected.
In addition, they suppressed the Spanish Revolution which more successfully achieved the long-term goals of the Communists than the Communists themselves. A pure power play.
This was part of Stalin’s commitment to socialism in one country; Trotsky, on the other hand, espoused the notion that there should be a world revolution and that communism would not be attainable without it, which from a Marxist perspective is the more orthodox point of view.
Well, indeed. The Russian Revolution (and a fortiori the Chinese one) was not the communist revolution Marx was talking about. Russia had not had its bourgeois revolution yet, or maybe what happened in 1917 was that, but Lenin was to impatient to wait through a proper period of capitalism (necessary in order to accumulate both the wealth and the proletarian frustration on which communism could be built), so he hi-jacked Russia’s revolution and fucked everything up.
The story of the Italian Communist Party member explaining communism o a local peasant farmer:
“So if a rich farmer has 2 cows, the state takes one and gives it to the poor farmer.”
“Yes, yes, I understand.”
“If a farmer has 2 goats, and the other has none, we take one goat and give it to the other farmer.”
“Yes, yes, I understand.”
“If a farmer has 2 chickens, and the other has none, we take one chicken and give it to the other farmer.”
“That part I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand about it?”
“I have 2 chickens…”
Another major point was that revolution was supposed to arrive through the will of the masses. Unfortunately, the proletariat were more interested in accumulating their own wealth than in following Marx’s road map. They needed to be persuaded, by whatever means necessary. Marx obviously, like Jesus before him, had an excessively optimistic view of human nature - that people would always altruistically give up all their worldly possessions and even their lives for the greater good of the whole; much like the faithful horse who should be happy to go to the glue factory to contribute to the animal farm’s assets. This is why communism did not work and why “persuasion” was necessary to implement it.
“In capitalism man exploits his fellow man. In communism, it’s the other way around.”
I think this is false; Marx’s doctrine does not rely on altruistic human nature. It relies on people casting of their shackles, rejecting false class consciousness, recognizing what Marx thinks is one’s true (class) interest, and acting accordingly. For Marx, relinquishing worldly possessions is not part of ‘acting accordingly’, because the proletariat have no worldly possessions, that is what defines them, and that is why they have nothing to lose but their chains.
In 1) getting rid of false class consciousness; 2) overcoming the collective action problem of mobilizing all those masses lies the real problem for Marxism - they have to act on behalf of their class but for different reasons, they may not do so. However, proletarians are not going to worry over relinquishing their worldly possessions because they don’t have any.
MichaelEMouse is still right - the party was called communist because that was the ideal they were striving towards, the country was called socialist because that was the reality that had thusfar been attained. Works the same way in a bunch of other places, such as Czechoslovakia, or Československá Socialistická Republika, where the *Komunistická *Strana Československa was in charge.