When and where did you do your travels? Living in the former USSR I can absolutely confirm the history is way more complicated, than it is commonly presented. Changes over time, changes depending on people you speak to. In my country we have had read army, Finnish army and Waffen SS veterans living out their lives quite peacefully together but they would no doubt give you a very different perspective on how the GULAG felt. And it’s not that you can tell from the outside.
As to the ideology, I agree with you about fundamentalism leading to death and destruction. Marxism, however, contains the premise, that one particular class must be liquidated. Also, it requires people to behave in a very particular and unnatural way leading easily to a conclusion that these should be eliminated too. So maybe it lends itself better as a tool for madmen raising to power, than some others. Maybe it’s not that people trying to implement Marxism have ended up in chaos but that people seeking absolute power have tended to use it as an ideological cover and to rally a support?
You are my hero, lionhearted. I could not agree with you more. My mother and the remnants of her family fled communist Russia in 1970. And when I say "fled" I really mean ran as fast and as far as they could. Marx preached violent struggle against those that had a different world view from his own. He should be demonized everywhere.
All Lenin did was decide that the dictatorship of the proletariat should be headed by an actual dictator. It's kind of an inevitable conclusion, given where he was starting from and some of the realities of people working in groups.
You are, of course, free to say that the murderous regimes that have popped up again and again are not the true Marxism. But then you have to explain why the false Marxism has appeared so often, and then to explain, given that millions of lives could be at stake, how to prevent a recurrence.
Please don't confuse Marx's theories with Marxism-Leninism. The latter is more like state capitalism, i.e like most 'communist' countries we have seen. If you actually read what communism, socialism and marxism are about, you'll find that they are a far cry from the ideology of the soviet union (as defined by their actions). For one, a dictatorship of the working class, such as direct democracy, is a cornerstone of communism but clearly did not feature in Soviet states. It was a distortion by Stalin, I believe, since it's also called Stalinism.
It does seem, however, mob mentality (think the effect Hitler's speeches had, despite such insane content) combined with a dictatorship of the proletariat creates the perfect open field for totalitarianism to take hold, where even further power is taken from the working class. The fact it also creates a scapegoat in the capitalist, wealthy class is even worse.
You do realize that "what Marx actually preached" and "what happened in Soviet Russia" don't have to be the same thing, right? Do you really believe that Marx preached power-hungry, paranoid rulers that execute anyone that disagrees with them (or is just 'suspected' of doing so)?
Arguing against "Marx really stood for Y" with "but X happened in Soviet Russia" is intellectually dishonest.
The whole notion of class struggle only serves to divide people and allow marxists to seize power. Lenin was not less evil than Stalin. USSR really really sucked (I was born in USSR).
Shipping people off to the gulags is not a feature of Marxism. My point here is that these terms get attached to political movements and then people mistake how the movement is practiced with the original thing.
Lenin was influenced by Marx. He considered himself a Marxist for certain. What he practiced was Totalitarianism.
The Nazi party's formal name was the "National Socialist German Worker's Party". You could argue they were influenced by Socialism, but you are being disingenuous if you make the leap to Socialism means exterminating the Jews.
Now, there are people that say that! They are wingnuts.
> I agree, but I think you could ask you average college Democrat and they'd equate the two.
> For over a century, real, existing Communism has been Marxism-Leninism
In what way? There has been dozens of ideological factions calling themselves "Communists" like various types of anarchists, left-communists, Orthodox Marxists etc. More importantly, there was academic Marxism which wasn't revolutionary in its intention, which affected dozens of fields including history and sociology, and had factions too (e.g. Frankfurt School)
> And then the Communists came to power
The rest of your comment makes sense to me but I still want to be cautious to make such claims. In a Marxist sense ideological Communists weren't communists as communists can only be members of the working class willing to rise up against the bourgeoisie. The difference is the category: the Communists who came to power had ideological intentions and not material intentions whereas communism is a by-definition material concept. I believe it's true that maybe parts of Russian revolution started out as a communist revolution but, as you said, given the economic structure of the country (not highly developed) communism was already dead by the time revolution was over. And we can talk endlessly for hours whether Lenin was a good communist or an asshole; but this is irrelevant because communism (just like capitalism) is never about single persons but about classes. When the Russian Revolution started being more about Lenin and less about the people, it was already not communist regardless of the "ideology" of Lenin. Given the history, and how "Communist" is liberally used to attack Marx, it's intellectual laziness or intellectual dishonesty to mention USSR, China or other supposedly "Communist" countries to make an argument about Marx. I read the entire corpus of Marx and he very rarely talks about implementations, and oftentimes they're his very early work (like the Manifesto) or when he's critiquing other ideas on implementation (like the Critique of Gotha's Program). Given all these issues I have, I almost never find a good rational discussion about Marxism on the internet, not in HN, not on "socialist" sites like r/socialism, r/communism etc... It's always entirely about the ideology which is something Marx tried to criticise his whole life. It feels like when teenagers "discuss" Nietzsche and they think he's a nihilist when Nietzsche spent his entire life attacking nihilism.
This is still relevant today. As Kennan points out, Marxism was a mere "moral fig leaf" covering the nakedness of "insecure nationalism".
The fig leaf seems to have been replaced in the era of Putin by a sort of generalized disdain for the west, and for western ideas like democracy and liberalism (in the sense of the word used in Europe, not the US).
But nothing ever really changes for the Russian state. Putin's Russia can be described and understood in the same terms as Soviet Russia and Czarist Russia before it.
I'll end by pointing out, again, as Kennan does, that I'm referring to the Russian state, rather than its long suffering people, who are some of the most warm hearted and genuine folks I've ever met.
It’s hard to separate Marxism from the USSR in the same way it’s difficult to separate facism from Nazi Germany, I think. I don’t see how one can reasonably separate a predominant ideology from the empire that popularized it.
This is something a lot of people forget: Russia before the revolution was not a modern, industrialised nation, it was a country still half stuck in the middle ages. I don't want to defend the atrocities and oppression of the Soviet system, but it has been very effective at industrialising a backwards peasant country.
(In fact, Marx considered Russia the least likely candidate for a communist revolution; it would start in England or Germany.)
Oh, sure. But then again, many would argue that there was no Marxism in USSR, either (at least not after the first decade or so).
One particular interpretation that seems to be fairly popular in "patriotic" circles is that the original Bolsheviks were Marxist, and they almost ruined Russia because of that; but then Stalin took power, purged them, and restored the imperial glory.
It’s no coincidence this is happening now. The seeds of Marxism were planted long before the Soviet Union died.
One of the most fascinating lectures by Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector, described 30+ years ago exactly what the long-term plans of the USSR were. It is eerie how much of it applies today: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1FElIhOh_KI
As to the ideology, I agree with you about fundamentalism leading to death and destruction. Marxism, however, contains the premise, that one particular class must be liquidated. Also, it requires people to behave in a very particular and unnatural way leading easily to a conclusion that these should be eliminated too. So maybe it lends itself better as a tool for madmen raising to power, than some others. Maybe it’s not that people trying to implement Marxism have ended up in chaos but that people seeking absolute power have tended to use it as an ideological cover and to rally a support?
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