I see a large trend in many peoples views on Communism. Most americans in particular seem to view communism as a fascist totalitarian state that controls ever aspect of our lives, destroying democracy and individualism. I (as an anarchist) find this almost as frustrating as the common interpretation of anarchy as chaos or disorder. I also find this a bit comical, as the level of blatant ignorance baffles me seeing that communism is on the far left (and remains a primarily economic system rather than a system of government) and fascism falls on the far right (along with capitalism mind you). Communism can be executed in many different fashions. The system of government greatly affects the way communism is executed and its success. For instance, communism running side by side any form of authoritarian State leads to the unequal production and distribution of wealth as the State and its elitist control this, completely defeating the point of communism. However, another communist system, libertarian-communism (also called Anarchist Communism, Anarcho-Communism ect.) eliminates The State and gives the production and distribution of the resources back into the hands of the people and its community. Thus, in my opinion, communism (particularly anarcho-communism) is a part of democracy. If democracy is based around the idea of a system controlled completely by its people then capitalism is an enemy of democracy because its creates social classes all of which influence the law, economy ect at different levels, the highest classes having the most control. However communism gives each person equal control over his/her life and gives each individual equal control of the community.
Communism in theory, is excellent.. But, it has proven itself impractical.. "Man" just screws it up.. We are too greedy and self-centered for it to work successfully.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
id disagree. "Man" or better put, human nature is extreamly affected by its enviorment. Our current one being hierarchy, capitalism, and authoritarianism instills greed and allows it to evolve. With anarcho-communism, human nature would change.
A brief point Part of that is the fact that the totalitarian disasters of history are all people have seen of Communism in action insofar as governments are concerned. As Marx wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Programme: Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Now the program does not deal with this nor with the future state of communist society. Therein seems to lie the riddle: Apparently, nobody has figured the route back out of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. ____________________ Notes: Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Programme. 1875. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970. Marxists.org. December 16, 2010. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/
i disagree with many of Marx's views. One being his views on the road to communism. I believe in a mix of direct revolution and evolution to communism. Revolution is definitely needed, but it must be executed under the right conditions and at the right time.
It's more that people confuse fascism with totalitarianism, and conflate communism with (totalitarian) Soviet communism, than that people actually mistake communism for fascism as such. Nobody who actually understands what fascism is makes that mistake - but we're a minority, unfortunately.
indeed :/ hopefuly this will soon change. Yesterday i found out that i had slowly (and unknowingly) turning my friend (and newist bandmate) into an anarchist just by talking about it here and there and whenever politics would come up. In the last month ive had 4 people proclaim anarchism, 2 communism and many are studying into both further. Education. The most imporant start to revolution.
The Moment The Revolution will be a tipping point, an organic moment. We are already on the path; this is part of the fundamental argument about stewardship and citizenship. As people rely more and more on the interconnectedness of one another as part of their rationale for policy outlooks, the collective will coalesce around the ideological skeleton. And then some issue will arise that puts the whole balance on trial, and the people will opt for the collective. The dictatorship of the proletariat, such as it is, will be the reigning in of oligarchy, and then, hopefully, it will be over—and without blood. The challenge is to avoid the dictatorship altogether, I believe. I just don't know how to do that.
Fascism has been defined as resistance to transcendence. Communism was intended to be a transcendence over the Industrial Era paradigm, the huge concentrations of capital that were required to execute the projects that built the industrial infrastructure. So by definition fascism and communism are opposites. The German fascists confused everyone by calling their party the National Socialists and making it appear to have a progressive or even transcendent goal. Early 20th century communists had a problem that led to their downfall. They attempted to implement the system in the heyday of the industrial era, when huge concentrations of capital were still necessary for getting the world's work done. Once they tossed out the capitalists themselves, who by definition were the experts at assembling and managing those concentrations, the only entity left that could possibly take over the task was the government. The government of a nation the size of the USSR is one hell of a large organism, with all of the characteristics inherent in any large organism: slow-moving, devoting a major portion of its energy to managing its own internal metabolism, highly insensitive to external stimuli. (Have I nicely avoided having to use the phrase "unaccountable and therefore inevitably corrupt"?) This is exactly the wrong profile for an entity responsible for administering a national economy. Couple this with Marx's naive attitude toward human nature, which he codified in an embellishment of his favorite quote from the Book of Acts: "To each according to his needs, from each according to his ability," and you end up with a workforce that is just as wrongly fashioned as the government that manages it: an assembly of people who believe that civilization can survive and even prosper if what a man takes from it need not in any way correlate with what he gives back. Soviet communism was one of the final twin turds that European Christianity laid on this poor planet, the other of course being the Holocaust. We are still trying to crawl out from under those two piles of Abraham's shit. Communism would have been better launched in this dawning Post-Industrial Era, the Electronic Age. Its projects do not need huge concentrations of capital: China is building a telephone network for more than a billion people without erecting a single telephone pole. With the exception of a few key corporations like FedEx, Microsoft and Google, smaller businesses are poised to be a hegemony of mid-sized leaders, as the industrial giants turn into scavengers, buying up each other's dead carcasses and ripping off the few remaining useable assets before they too go belly-up. This is a marketplace in which a huge, powerful government will not be needed. And as so much of the world's hard work has been automated, today's workers can get away with being considerably lazier than their great-grandparents, emulating the civil service model of "employment" in which one is paid for a full year's time without having any accomplishments to show for it. An Information Age economy will not dissipate its capital and then resort to annexing its neighbors in order to dissipate their capital, the way the USSR did. Information, the new commodity, is absurdly cheap and easy to duplicate and distribute. It is a Soviet-style communist's paradise and it's a pity they were born a hundred years too early to enjoy it. Perhaps a new breed of communists will arise. Or perhaps the post-industrial paradigm will hatch a new kind of economic force. As the old Chinese curse goes, "May you live during interesting times."
The thing is that what you're describing is a product of Russia's geography, not some distinct, mutable feature of the state. The various Russian states (from the Tsars through the Communists right up to today) have all looked like that, and there are fundamental geographic determinants for this. To wit: Russia lacks navigable waterways that connect economically useful areas (their rivers mostly drain into the Arctic, and the Volga tends to freeze over for like half of the year) and also lacks geographical barriers to invasion. This means that Russia requires a ton of infrastructure to make its economy function (Trans-Siberian railroad, huge networks of gas pipelines, etc.) as well as a massive standing army (since it's plains suitable for tank warfare all the way to Paris). Which is to say, the Russian state is necessarily going to be centralized, capital-intensive and overbearing relative to the rest of the economy. It's not a matter of ideology, or historical timing, or development, or whatever - it's just geography. That country can't function in any other way. Contrast that with a country like the United States, which is blessed with a huge network of natural waterways that interconnect a massive breadbasket to the sea, and is separated from potential threats by massive oceans (so, no requirement for extensive infrastructure or massive standing armies merely to function). A state with that geography is inherently less capital-intensive, and so produces a capital surplus and can sustain a smaller, less centralized state. Again, just a matter of geography - this tells us nothing in particular about "Communism" or whatever. Yeah, that's not right. The infrastructure that enables the putative Electronic Age requires absolutely massive concentrations of capital. So big, in fact, that they end up creating entire ecosystems in which smaller concentrations can play. It's not that the big concentrations have disappeared or become irrelevant - it's that they've become so big that they don't even feel threatened by the smaller (or even medium-sized) concentrations. And that network is much, much more capital-intensive than the old telephone-pole style. Telephone poles are labor intensive - cell towers are capital-intensive. Likewise, cell phones are much more capital-intensive than regular old landline phones. China in general is just about the last example you want here - their economic policies heavily emphasize the centralized accumulation and deployment of capital, to the point of subsidizing such on the backs of regular workers/consumers. Think of all the stuff they're famous for lately: the Three Gorges Dam, the Great Firewall, those shiny new cities full of skyscrapers and factories: every single one of those things requires heavy centralization and concentration of capital.
