Communism. Good or bad. What do you really know about Communism?

[scoundrel]

Once upon a time there were two philosophies of social organisation and governance. One was called Communism and the other was called Fascism. It was quite hard for ordinary people not in the know to tell them apart.

• Both believed in destroying the old world order to build a new world order.
• Both despised democracy as weak and corrupt and spineless.
• Both believed the state must struggle to survive regardless of the consequences for individual citizens and even if this struggle means war.
• Both use the authority of the state to control all human activity.
• Both exercise one party rule.
• Both have all powerful leaders who are worshiped.
• Both control all human activities, especially religion and the press.
• Both forbid free trade unions or strikes.
• Both rely on secret police and imprisonment without trial.

Fortunately, the uniforms have different colours depending on whather you are a Communist or a Fascist.

[LaughingBoy]

Originally Posted by Wendigo

Communism. Good or bad ?


Frankly people who insist on forever living by or quoting passages from 150 year old books worry me, I see very little difference between them and the bible bashing creationist morons that have evolved in the U.S.A.

If I was to choose any words to live my life by then you could do a lot worse than some more modern quotes.

"With great power there must also come ... great responsibility."
"Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor"
"It's Clobberin' Time"


'Nuff Said.
Excelsior !!

Ben Grimm...Poet...

But, like Marx, he had thorns in his side... those jokers down on Yancy Street come to mind...

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by Wendigo

Er it was actually a speech in the House of Commons on 11 November 1947, just after WW2, that war in which one large group of Marxists couldn't quite decide which way to point their guns

Ok... not 100 years ago. 70 years ago.

Churchill was an alcoholic depressed guy, who declared to see Gandhi dead.

"We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died."

Winston Churchill

Gandhi... a bad man?
The man who peacefully liberated a whole people from the invader!

Originally Posted by scoundrel

Once upon a time there were two philosophies of social organisation and governance. One was called Communism and the other was called Fascism. It was quite hard for ordinary people not in the know to tell them apart.

• Both believed in destroying the old world order to build a new world order.
• Both despised democracy as weak and corrupt and spineless.
• Both believed the state must struggle to survive regardless of the consequences for individual citizens and even if this struggle means war.
• Both use the authority of the state to control all human activity.
• Both exercise one party rule.
• Both have all powerful leaders who are worshiped.
• Both control all human activities, especially religion and the press.
• Both forbid free trade unions or strikes.
• Both rely on secret police and imprisonment without trial.
  

Fortunately, the uniforms have different colours depending on whather you are a Communist or a Fascist.

I put in red all incorrect or biaised statements about Karl Marx theory.

Excellent resume on youtube here IN ENGLISH 9 minutes.

Marx theory is about freedom, freedom, freedom and .... freedom.

But his points of view of freedom are not funny for masters of our societies.

[Estreeter]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

You hate your job, but hopefully you earn good money. I'm almost glad for you. I'd prefer that you earn good money and like your job.
What you don't understand, it's that we could all earn good money and having fun.

I hate my job, I hate the idiots I work for, gutless managers who prefer to use emails rather than face to face, on call 24/7, the odd meeting I have to attend on a day off, It's extremely hot even in the winter and add our summer heat that takes it to another level altogether.

The job I like, electrician, well that's a highly paid trade here to begin with as there has been a shortage of them for about 20 years now, about 100 grand is the average per year here, but me having a my trade plus the supervisor role has me, can't remember, might have been 175 grand last year, plus a company car. A lot of that I save and will be able to retire early and fully self funded retirement.

My retirement age will be 67, I'm 50 now and hoping we'll save enough so I can retire at age 57 or 58, that's a decade early and a decade we can do what we want

I'll work hard now and while I can so I won't have to when I'm older and have to rely on a Government pension. My choice, again

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by Estreeter

I hate my job, I hate the idiots I work for, gutless managers who prefer to use emails rather than face to face, on call 24/7, the odd meeting ......

I'll work hard now and while I can so I won't have to when I'm older and have to rely on a Government pension. My choice, again

I wish you the best for the rest of your life.

Having done hard well paid jobs and fun well paid jobs from 25 to 35 years old... Not having wasted my money in material bullshits according my personal philosophy. Living in a small community, we share the fees. I'm 50% to 60% retired since... 10 years (I work from 70 to 100 days per year).
Apart if there will be a huge crisis, I need 10'000$ per year (in a country where the lowest class need to earn at least 40'000$ to survive).

Asceticism is my personal point of view of freedom.

[Brecht]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

Once upon a time there were two philosophies of social organisation and governance. One was called Communism and the other was called Fascism. It was quite hard for ordinary people not in the know to tell them apart.

• Both believed in destroying the old world order to build a new world order.
• Both despised democracy as weak and corrupt and spineless.
• Both believed the state must struggle to survive regardless of the consequences for individual citizens and even if this struggle means war.
• Both use the authority of the state to control all human activity.
• Both exercise one party rule.
• Both have all powerful leaders who are worshiped.
• Both control all human activities, especially religion and the press.
• Both forbid free trade unions or strikes.
• Both rely on secret police and imprisonment without trial.

Fortunately, the uniforms have different colours depending on whather you are a Communist or a Fascist.

You can rest assured that nobody felt the scourge of fascism like ordinary people did. It was especially ordinary people who knew how to tell them apart. Frankly, old friend, I'm disappointed of how easy you make it for me to debunk the points in the quote above and you know that I usually admire your well-argued and elegantly articulated insights, even in disagreement.

I think that the ordinary people (English, Irish and Jewish workers, labor activists of whom most were anarchists, socialists and communists) who stood up to the march of the British Union of Fascists in London's East End in 1936 knew the big difference between fascism and communism, especially while they were beaten up by the police that was protecting the fascists. These events went down in history as the Battle of Cable Street.

If fascists believed in destroying the old world order, how come the most prominent members of that movement, particularly in Britain, were individuals who represented that very order? They were staunch elitists, monarchists, anti-communists and anti-democrats who believed in the "natural order" of inequality between humans, both social classes and races. Oswald Mosley was an aristocrat himself. The British Union of Fascists enjoyed great support among the British elite, even wealthy Jews until Mosley adopted an anti-semitic line in 1936. A well-known sponsor of the British fascists was Lord Rothermere, otherwise known as the founder of your trash papers, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, and a man who hoped the Nazis would restore monarchy in Germany.

The BUF's "intellectual circle", the January Club, was a gathering of these individuals:

• COLONEL LORD MIDDLETON, a director of the Yorkshire Insurance Co, Malton Investment Trust, British Coal Refining Processes Ltd, and three other companies. He owned about 15,000 acres of land and minerals in Nottinghamshire.
• GENERAL SIR HUBERT DE LA POER GOUGH, GCMG, KCB, KCVO, Commander of the Fifth Army 1916-18 and Chief of the Allied Mission to the Baltic, 1919 (Russian intervention), director of Siemens Bros, Caxton Electric Development Ltd, Enfield Rolling Mills, and two other companies.
• AIR COMMODORE CHAMIER, CB, CMG, OBE, DSO, late Indian Army. Aviation consultant and agent to, and lately director of, Vickers Aviation Ltd.
• VINCENT C VICKERS, director of the London Assurance Corporation and a large shareholder in Vickers Ltd.
• LORD LLOYD, former Governor of Bombay…
• THE EARL OF GLASGOW, Privy Councillor, brother-in-law to Sir Thomas Inskip, the Attorney General, who was responsible for the Sedition Bill in the House of Commons. The Earl owned Kelburn Castle, Ayrshire, and about 2500 acres.
• MAJOR NATHAN, Liberal MP for NE Bethnal Green…a member of the Jewish Agency under the mandate for Palestine…Chairman of the Anglo-Chinese Finance and Trade Corporation…
• WARD PRICE, special correspondent to the Daily Mail and director of Associated Newspapers and British Movietone News.
• WING COMMANDER SIR LOUIS GRIEG, KBE, CBO, RAF, partner in J and H Scrimageour, stockbrokers, director of Handley Page Ltd, and an insurance company and Gentleman Usher in Ordinary to the King.
• LADY RAVENDALE, Baroness, sister-in-law to Mosley and granddaughter to Levi Leiter.
• COUNT and COUNTESS PAUL MUNSTER.
• MAJOR METCALFE, MVO, MC, brother-in-law of Lady Cynthia Mosley and Lady Ravendale, late aide-de-camp to the Prince of Wales and the Commander in Chief in India.
• SIR PHILIP MAGNUS, Bart, a leading Conservative.
• SIR CHARLES PETRIE
• HON. J F RENNEL RODD, heir to Baron Rennell, and a partner in Morgan, Grenfell & Co.
• RALPH D BLUMENFELD, Chairman of the Daily Express, formerly editor. He was once editor of the Daily Mail. He is the founder of the Anti-Socialist Union and a member of its Executive Committee.

Fascism was set up to combat socialism and the demands for more democracy and social equality as articulated by the labor movement. In other words, fascism was set up to protect the old order. But to do so, it had to present itself as something new, something "revolutionary". The nature and pugnacity of fascism was not the same everywhere and depended on a country's economic condition and state of class struggle. Industrialized and highly capitalist countries like Germany and Britain, where the capitalist class fused with nobility, had a slightly different flavor of fascism than, say, Spain or Croatia during WWII. The latter were still very agrarian, even feudal, which is also the reason why they were strongly aligned with the Church.

Do you know when the BUF was banned? Only in 1940. One might think because the British establishment went anti-fascist. Not really. Nazi Germany was a rival imperialist power and a threat to said establishment's interests. Since the BUF were advocating an alliance with Nazi Germany, something that by 1940 became impossible due to the disparate interests of British and German capitalists in their struggle for world markets, raw materials and profits, they became a liability.

Communism is exactly the opposite of fascism and this is why it was fought by the Mosleys, Mussolinis, Hitlers and Francos of the world. While fascism intends to restore the old order in which "everyone knows his place", communism stands for a classless society, a world of free individuals where humans treat each other as humans. There is no party rule or the (mis)use of state authority. It's a world in which people are the masters of their own lives but this future comes at a cost like all the other great leaps in the history of civilization. Communism is not a prophecy or moral philosophy. Marx and Engels were the first to turn communism into real science, something we call "scientific socialism" today. They dedicated their entire lives to study and understand where our civilization comes from, where it is and where it may go, forward or backward. Like scientists study the laws of nature, Marxists study the laws of history, society and economy. It requires a deep knowledge of history, all its modes of production from primitive societies, over ancient slaveholder societies, feudalism, mercantilism up to capitalism.

Most of us mere mortals don't have the time and opportunity to grasp all this. That's Marxism's biggest disadvantage. But many notable Marxists made great efforts to educate working people and help them understand the structure and dynamics of our society. What Marx and Engels gave the working class is an intellectual weapon. The rest is up to them and not some authoritarian party or state. In order to understand why things went wrong in the Soviet Union and other self-declared socialist countries, you have to understand their inner problems and their interaction with the rest of the world, especially the capitalist world composed of major imperial powers that were so much in advantage compared to Russia, China or Vietnam that were basically peasant societies with little to no undustry. Where there's no industry and capitalism, there's no working class and where there's no working class, there are no trade unions. You can't have socialism wthout unions or it's not socialism.

Our quality of life owes everything to the battles fought by our labor movements and the capitalists' fear from Revolution and the big ideological enemy at their door, the Soviet Union and its block. You might say the workers in the West profited more from the Soviet Union than workers in the East.

We all forget the past and those who fought for a better future for the majority of us. With full bellies and distracted by consumerism, celebrity worship, the sexualization of everything and escapism represented by spending most of our spare time not on educating ourselves but on video games, television shows and idiotic blockbusters, we've become the perfect tools of the ruling classes.

It's alright to disagree with communism but try to do some reading in that field to get a better picture of what it is, so you can say that you know why you hate it. I can respect that. But you're not going to understand communism from Churchill speeches, for this was a man who was a great admirer of Mussolini and fascism and a non-compromizing elitist who never hid his contempt for the "lower classes", British included. He stood for the interests of his class which only makes sense. But his interests are not yours.

[Estreeter]

Originally Posted by Brecht

Fascism was set up to combat socialism

To the point where they both come full circle and meet,
As bad as each other, don't know which is worse to be quite frank,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_k...munist_regimes

Nobody should defend either,

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by Estreeter

To the point where they both come full circle and meet,
As bad as each other, don't know which is worse to be quite frank,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_k...munist_regimes

Nobody should defend either,

This is not a serious wikipedia page.
Read it carefully, the numbers of victims are incredibly unclear, the causes are not verified and still disputed by several historians teaching in European universities.
And even if they were correct, China, USSR didn't follow Marxism.
Khmer Rouge were xenophobic. Marxism is not a xenophobic ideology, but fascism is reputed to be racist and nationalist.

In comparison, the massacres of European fascism are well documented and verified.
In Europe, the fascists always massacred the communists. It was the fact in France, in Spain, in Italy, in Germany.
Fascists were sponsored by bankers, because fascists were business friendly.

[Mal Hombre]

In Spain during the Civil war,The Communists massacred the Marxists and the Socialists,George Orwell narrowly avoided being purged Himself..

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by Mal Hombre

In Spain during the Civil war,The Communists massacred the Marxists and the Socialists,George Orwell narrowly avoided being purged Himself..

So... are communists marxist or not?
That's all the problem in this topic and maybe not only in this topic... between a dilemna of definitions!

If you read Marx... it's quite cool.