Also the link you provide, from Lebowitz, is more about exploring Marx's unfinished work, from a sentiment that the Capital was excessively deterministic, reductionist and lacking a humanist touch. This kind of research work will not replace the fact that the fundamentals of marxism are just that. Also you may post a thousand links like that, actually saying nothing, I won't bother analyzing them more. This is not a discussion about marxism and its application. I gave the general ideas, justified them with the ideology (which you could accept or not, comment, but not demand quotations as if we cannot use our own mind and say that seeing the society in a dialectical and historical materialism is blatantly reductionist, and led to revolutions and dictatorships.
If you really want more hairsplitting, do start a diary. My original remark was about the press freedom in communist dictatorship (term generally accepted today) and you dragging it astray is pointless. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
It is not such peripherical phrase, but the antagonism (dialectic) and the materialism along with the whole idea of taking over power that led to the bloodbaths.
It is said that a good description of chutzpah is to murder your parents and then plead for clemency on account of being an orphan.
I wonder whether we have found an even better one: To lambast a political theorist for being excessively deterministic, on account of historical determinism deterministically leading to genocide.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Do look up the history of the left wing of the Perónists. When you can place them in the correct country (and perhaps the correct decades), we can argue the merits of calling them communists, the merits of calling them totalitarian oppressors, and then the implications of the conclusions from the above points to your claim that Marxism leads inevitably and deterministically to repression and totalitarianism.
And then we can continue on to the Sandinistas, the Argentine social democrats, the Paris Commune, the left wing of the PLO, Nasserite pan-Arabism and so on and so forth.
Now, if it turns out that even one of these groups can rightly be called communists but cannot be said to be violent oppressors, your claim of deterministic causality between Marxism and totalitarian repression goes the way of the dodos, and you'll have to backpedal to a much looser Bayesian claim.
Should it turn out, then, that not even the majority of these groups imposed totalitarian dictatorships (or attempted to do so), your position will become decidedly precarious.
But you'll have to do a little reading first, I think, because I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that you don't know half those groups even by reputation. And I'm done doing your homework for you.
Those who were in a position to, and did not, were not real marxists :) I know all of those groups, I'm just not in the mood / not the time to discuss such a huge topic here and now - for instance, the Sandinistas can hardly be called marxist or communist, they looked like that, but their actual ideology never followed, and their policies when in power were hardly looking up to the Communist Society.
If you look a bit around, you'll see those who say those dictatorships were not true communists, are the latest surviving communist faithful. Fortunately in France we're almost done with both extremes, and I can't tell you how much more quiet and peaceful everything is :) Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Interesting. So, in your mind, had the 1956 Hungarian Revolution prevailed in Hungary or the Prague Spring in the Czech Republic; Imre Nagy, the Workers' Councils or Dubček would have progressed to exterminating the enemy class? *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Neither the 1956 Revolution, nor the Prague Spring was an ideologically homogenous movement. However, Nagy, a large part of the Workers' Councils (which in fact survived the Revolution, were at first recognised by the new regime, and were dismantled only over the next two months) and Dubček were all card-carrying communists. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
"Those"? You are trying to change the subject for a second time. I asked you about Nagy, the 1956 Workers Councils, and Dubček.
Gorbatchev was a card-carrying communist too, even the best of them, right. And look where he brought them :)
Not into the extermination of the enemy class. QED. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I said that a man with a card doesn't make him communist. You don't agree that the USSR was a communist dictatorship ? Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
