Y’know what’s great? Even the communists are embracing capitalism. 
Sandino, if you’re a good boy I’ll buy you a Karl Marx lunchbox for Christmas.
OK, let’s do that! But HOW are you going to do that? Since you don’t own the assets, you will have a hard time convincing those that do that they should just hand them over.
As Marx pointed out, only the working class can liberate itself. We hail the October Revolution as the only example so far, apart from the brief struggle of the Parisian Communards, of the working class taking power.
I mentioned this before.
What about East Germany in 1953?
Regards,
Shodan
Sandino,
I’m a little late to add much to this debate, but I have to say that if you don’t recognize that Lenin was contemptible, you will be doomed to repeat the same awful mistakes of the USSR.
You can debate whether or not the USSR was “state capitalism”, but the fundamental fact to me is that it was just another oppressor holding the gun.
I do not believe, as others have stated in this thread that humans are “naturally” hiearchical. However,a philoshophy based on violent revolution and coercion will only reinforce these tendencies to it’s own detriment.
I’m reminded, after reading Sandino’s spirited defense of purity in marxism, of Frank Herbert’s dictum: “All revolutionaries are closet aristocrats.”
As Marx pointed out, only the working class can liberate itself. We hail the October Revolution as the only example so far, apart from the brief struggle of the Parisian Communards, of the working class taking power.
Something the working class has never even come close to wanting to do. Which is why some impatient, pampered upper class yuppies decided to do it for them because they weren’t intelligent enough to know that Communism like, ruled and stuff.
I did say I wasn’t going to get into any debates with Sandino, but I just can’t let this contradiction go without comment.
which was preceded by
Riddle me this, O acolyte of pure revolutionary Marxism - if the October Revolution of 1917 was the last example of the working class taking power, how can China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba be considered “workers’ states”?
Sandino, as adaher pointed out, Lenin was not part of the working class-he came from the noble class, as bourgeoisie as all get out-his father was a university professor.
adaher doesn’t even have the faintest glimpse of the actual history of the Russian Revolution, for one thing. The whole chronology of 1917 is nothing but the working class pushing for change - firstly to stop the war that was bleeding them dry, then for real social change as the provisional government they originally trusted didn’t stop the war as promised. Lenin arrived in Petrograd in April 1917; it took him months to convince the Bolsheviks that they needed to put a revolution on the agenda, and months more for the Bolsheviks to win the workers in the Soviets over to the same perspective. It wasn’t abstract, either; they had the material experience of life under the Provisional Government to illustrate their case.
The working class in Russia did want to take power by November 1917; it was because their own experiences, and the arguments of the Bolsheviks, finally convinced them of the need to do so. There was nothing impatient about it on the side of the Bolsheviks, and the greatest illustration of that is the fact that the working class fought like hell for the next four years in the Civil War to defend what had been accomplished. If the Bolsheviks had taken power just because they wanted to, regardless of the will of the working class, the workers would have abandoned the Revolution almost as soon as the first White shot was fired.
OK, Olentzero, but it seems a little sloppy to assume that all of the fervor which the people the White Armies was due to love of the communist position. How much of it was due to the fact that many of the Whites were avowedly royalists? How much of the distrust of the nacent Duma was due to its failures, and how much was due to the nasty state the country was in.
There were many reasons people did the things they did in Russia during 1917-1921. Some of them clearly were motivated by communists philosophy. Some of them by “economic class struggle”. But equally true is the proposition that outrageously incompetent leadership under the Tsar lead the country to disaster. Its possible that the people would have followed hitler if he had promised them a better life and revenge against the Tsar.
Have there ever been any popular communist uprisings against a any state, capitalist or otherwise, which was not precipitated by an extreme crisis (war)?
Good point, but you can’t assume that people fought in the civil war for one reason and one reason only. The Bolsheviks argued their position tirelessly, and their arguments covered all those reasons you cite and more. Furthermore, their efforts didn’t consist solely of newspapers and radio broadcasts (such as they were) from behind the walls of the Kremlin while the rank and file was out at the fronts. Trotsky, while head of the Red Army, spent two years on the rails moving from front to front, meeting with the soldiers face to face in mass rallies.
Firstly, you assume Hitler had an easy job of it in the late 1920s - all he had to do was get up on a soapbox and snap millions of Germans flooded into the NSDAP. Not so. There was still a tremendous amount of Communist sympathy and more or less organized leftist parties, as well as unions, that Hitler and his nascent party had to completely smash (with funding and assistance from German big business) before they could present themselves as a viable option - and an electoral one, no less. I am, of course, nowhere near asserting that Lenin and the Bolsheviks resorted to the same sort of street thuggery the Nazis did in their bid to gain influence among the working class. I’m merely trying to illustrate the point that simple economic and political desperation are not enough to win the hearts and minds of millions to a cause.
No, not that I can think of. But again, it isn’t the crisis alone that precipitates a communist (or other) uprising. There are other factors involved, the main one of which is the mood among the lower classes. Are they angry enough to fight or too demoralized to do anything more than hope desperately that they’ll find enough to eat tomorrow? Nothing is a given in a situation like that.