I intend for us to discuss Marxism as a system of government, not as an economic theory, usually referred to as Communism. If you want to discuss Communism, please do so in any one of the economic threads. The names and historical events I mention will be those that Russia experienced almost a hundred years ago. China has also tried to install political Marxism, but with different results for these reasons:
1. The Cultural Revolution in China half a century ago took a different approach to the problem of governing their people. It wasn't pure Marxism, it was a combination of that and other political theories, including some free-market economics in the majority of the land, which was still rural and difficult to govern from Peking/Bejing. The Chinese leaders also had to deal with a loss of political control over small-population areas like Tibet, Nepal, various islands, and the towns that bordered Mongolia. After the Cultural Revolution began, the new Chinese government also faced a bigger political challenge with the people on Formosa/Taiwan because of the water between it and Mainland China. The Marxists who took over Russia, on the other hand, had a large, industrialized country with many natural resources to draw upon. If they had allowed most of the Russian-speaking people to remain unorganized politically, the new country might have survived the early 1930s better, when the US was experiencing the worst of the Great Depression.
2. China had a different history than Russia did. Before the Russian Revolution, the country was governed by a large and wealthy family who became an easily-identifiable enemy for the people to hate in unison. China had nothing to compare to it, which denied them what they told the Chinese people they hated - a visible enemy.
Marxism, as a political system, is unworkable. It prevents any set of people, in any country where Marxism is tried, in any historical period and in any set of economic circumstances from making their people happy to be citizens, mainly because it is a system that does not allow the people being "governed" to remove anyone that is unsuited for the job. That is the fatal flaw in Marxism. Marxist leaders are not really chosen by the people and so they are not accountable to the people.
As a political system, it sets up a top-down government. One man with charisma and a revolutionary vision, like Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, or (arguably) Nikita Krushev, tells a few trusted others (the Central Committee) how to organize other people (the Russian Parliament) into a movement that organizes millions of ordinary workers into one proletariat, all moving in the same direction, and all under strict state control in any political sense.
The state chooses governors, mayors, judges, and police chiefs. Military leaders at the highest level swear allegiance to the state or sometimes to one nationwide political party, not to a foundational document like our Constitution, as military leaders do in the U.S. Teachers at every grade level are given textbooks that are approved by the national government, not by local school committees. Major corporations are owned by the state and are run by state-approved executives and local managers.
The flaw in this system is simple. No man, woman, or child can avoid making mistakes. Lenin was so detached from his own people that he didn't even know when a mob of Russian people, a true grass-roots mass-movement, would storm the gates of the Palace, kill most of the ruling family, and install their own choices in the Russian Parliament building. He was informed of it while he was writing a book in London. When he learned about what the people had done in his absence, he arrived by train, demanded to be the new leader, threw the people's choices for Parliament Members out of the building, told his guards to empty the building, and shut the doors. The Russian people did on their own what Karl Marx demanded - the overthrow of an oppressive regime, but he refused to give them any credit for it, and his personal vanity prevented him from "capitalizing" on the first Russian Revolution. If he had not been so vain, he could have worked with the people's choice, but instead, the revolution that Marx wanted was delayed by Lenin. He started a second revolution, but one that lacked the one vital ingredient - the approval of the people.
Joseph Stalin was an alcoholic, and that may have been responsible for his decision as the head of the party to organize into a political force most of the Ukraine, an area that had large areas of farmland. If he had been a better chief executive, he would have realized that he had an extraordinary asset, one that could have fed the large country that he was trying to unite under himself as a single political leader, and that it would be better for him to let the Ukrainians be farmers instead of revolutionaries.
Any political system that refuses to give the people a peaceful and legal way to remove poor-quality people from high office leaves people with only four alternatives.
1. leave the country (if the heavily armed border guards will allow it)
2. wait for the incompetent man at the top to retire or die (that could take awhile),
3. ask for help from religious leaders (unless the state has turned their churches into museums), or
4. assassinate the man at the top and hope that the policies change when a new man is chosen.
The alternative (in this country, at least) to this unworkable system is political stability based on the fact that every political leader in this country swears allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, and that document even allows the U.S. Congress to impeach high officials, including the President himself, and remove them from office, replacing them with someone else.
Other countries that have stable governments, notably England, which does not have a constitution, also does not have a large family whose personal choices dictate where people live and work, where their children go to school, how, when, and where people worship, and how and when they can vote. The British Royal Family is in political control over the Church of England, but they do not force anyone to go or to stay away from whatever church people wish to attend.
Stable, peaceful, and long-term government systems depend for their very lives on the acceptance by the government and every man, woman, and child who participates in it that no man, including the head of the national government, in this country, in Russia, or any other country, is or ever will be perfect. Every political leader, including our own President, must be accountable to his people.
1. The Cultural Revolution in China half a century ago took a different approach to the problem of governing their people. It wasn't pure Marxism, it was a combination of that and other political theories, including some free-market economics in the majority of the land, which was still rural and difficult to govern from Peking/Bejing. The Chinese leaders also had to deal with a loss of political control over small-population areas like Tibet, Nepal, various islands, and the towns that bordered Mongolia. After the Cultural Revolution began, the new Chinese government also faced a bigger political challenge with the people on Formosa/Taiwan because of the water between it and Mainland China. The Marxists who took over Russia, on the other hand, had a large, industrialized country with many natural resources to draw upon. If they had allowed most of the Russian-speaking people to remain unorganized politically, the new country might have survived the early 1930s better, when the US was experiencing the worst of the Great Depression.
2. China had a different history than Russia did. Before the Russian Revolution, the country was governed by a large and wealthy family who became an easily-identifiable enemy for the people to hate in unison. China had nothing to compare to it, which denied them what they told the Chinese people they hated - a visible enemy.
Marxism, as a political system, is unworkable. It prevents any set of people, in any country where Marxism is tried, in any historical period and in any set of economic circumstances from making their people happy to be citizens, mainly because it is a system that does not allow the people being "governed" to remove anyone that is unsuited for the job. That is the fatal flaw in Marxism. Marxist leaders are not really chosen by the people and so they are not accountable to the people.
As a political system, it sets up a top-down government. One man with charisma and a revolutionary vision, like Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, or (arguably) Nikita Krushev, tells a few trusted others (the Central Committee) how to organize other people (the Russian Parliament) into a movement that organizes millions of ordinary workers into one proletariat, all moving in the same direction, and all under strict state control in any political sense.
The state chooses governors, mayors, judges, and police chiefs. Military leaders at the highest level swear allegiance to the state or sometimes to one nationwide political party, not to a foundational document like our Constitution, as military leaders do in the U.S. Teachers at every grade level are given textbooks that are approved by the national government, not by local school committees. Major corporations are owned by the state and are run by state-approved executives and local managers.
The flaw in this system is simple. No man, woman, or child can avoid making mistakes. Lenin was so detached from his own people that he didn't even know when a mob of Russian people, a true grass-roots mass-movement, would storm the gates of the Palace, kill most of the ruling family, and install their own choices in the Russian Parliament building. He was informed of it while he was writing a book in London. When he learned about what the people had done in his absence, he arrived by train, demanded to be the new leader, threw the people's choices for Parliament Members out of the building, told his guards to empty the building, and shut the doors. The Russian people did on their own what Karl Marx demanded - the overthrow of an oppressive regime, but he refused to give them any credit for it, and his personal vanity prevented him from "capitalizing" on the first Russian Revolution. If he had not been so vain, he could have worked with the people's choice, but instead, the revolution that Marx wanted was delayed by Lenin. He started a second revolution, but one that lacked the one vital ingredient - the approval of the people.
Joseph Stalin was an alcoholic, and that may have been responsible for his decision as the head of the party to organize into a political force most of the Ukraine, an area that had large areas of farmland. If he had been a better chief executive, he would have realized that he had an extraordinary asset, one that could have fed the large country that he was trying to unite under himself as a single political leader, and that it would be better for him to let the Ukrainians be farmers instead of revolutionaries.
Any political system that refuses to give the people a peaceful and legal way to remove poor-quality people from high office leaves people with only four alternatives.
1. leave the country (if the heavily armed border guards will allow it)
2. wait for the incompetent man at the top to retire or die (that could take awhile),
3. ask for help from religious leaders (unless the state has turned their churches into museums), or
4. assassinate the man at the top and hope that the policies change when a new man is chosen.
The alternative (in this country, at least) to this unworkable system is political stability based on the fact that every political leader in this country swears allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, and that document even allows the U.S. Congress to impeach high officials, including the President himself, and remove them from office, replacing them with someone else.
Other countries that have stable governments, notably England, which does not have a constitution, also does not have a large family whose personal choices dictate where people live and work, where their children go to school, how, when, and where people worship, and how and when they can vote. The British Royal Family is in political control over the Church of England, but they do not force anyone to go or to stay away from whatever church people wish to attend.
Stable, peaceful, and long-term government systems depend for their very lives on the acceptance by the government and every man, woman, and child who participates in it that no man, including the head of the national government, in this country, in Russia, or any other country, is or ever will be perfect. Every political leader, including our own President, must be accountable to his people.
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