Socialism 101. Princples of Communism.

As I was doing research for my socialism 101 threads, I came across a very good resource for understanding the basics of Communism. It is essentially a FAQ written by Engels. It is fairly short and very easy to read and understand, much more so than the Manifesto. I encourage anyone who is interested in Communism to check it out, I'll try to answer questions if I can. Here is the link: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

Thanks.

Well, fellow proles, how's that bourgeoisie thing working for ya'?

I don't advocate communism, per se, but the OP is providing a mini-class in political ideologies from which we can draw ideas and conclusions. The time is ripe. It doesn't hurt to spend some time visiting, (or revisiting) some theories in order to ascertain where we are now and where we might like to go, should the opportunity present itself.

We could also consider the failures of previous ideologies, (which were also cast in a different time and context) and contemplate the reasons for them. Some things work well as ideas and on paper, but their execution depends on many factors and more understanding of social situations, circumstances and opposing forces.

I think we are poised on the brink of a long-overdue transformation that will emerge from our desires to see more equity and justice in a world that is fully capable of providing it if the barriers provided by the current, vested interests were not allowed to stand, as if impenetrable, for the sake of a few.

The current system is looking to be either broken beyond repair from our perspective, or, it is functioning ever more precisely and accurately when it comes to control and exploitation of more and more people. The bifurcation point for us is to decide what to bring about in order to forge a system that serves us well, or to continue carrying the weight of the system by serving the intentions of the Status Quo, regardless of how much loss and sacrifice we will be required to bear in doing so.

These are interesting times and you and your progeny, like it or not, are part of it. You are a part of how it is going to go, one way or another. You will be living in the results.

We've now had about 150 years of Marx and Engels and several stabs at socialism/communism. What most people don't realize is that there's NEVER been a socialist/communist state that hasn't been the victim of a reaction by the capitalist/bourgeosie class. And ANY time you get a violent reaction it warps the WHOLE process. Even if the reaction is relatively nonviolent (Cuba) it STILL results in economic sanctions that warp the development of socialism. Because the capitalist system is a FULLY developed economic system it will be more powerful than any budding replacement system (socialism) UNTIL THERE ARE MORE SOCIALIST SYSTEMS THAN CAPITALIST ONES in operation. And this is ESPECIALLY true when the replacement system is being warred on by the replaced system. This is a tough go.

However, in THIS country, we're a fully developed capitalist society. This which means that the productive means FOR socialims are also fully developed. AND as I said in the first paragraph, we've had 150 years of attempts. Folks, WE'RE SMART ENOUGH TO LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES. I don't think that a socialist USA would go through the same pattern as the USSR did. Or China. Or Cambodia, Cuba or any other socialist attempt in the past.

What I would like to see is a socialist system come into being somewhere where the capitalists left it alone to develope as it would. I think in a relatively short time the advantages of a non-combative socialist system would show itself strongly to the world. And I think that the USA could be that showcase.

it alone to develop as it would." I highly doubt we will see that. The capitalists will see that country's potential success as a threat to their system and will do everything within their vast power to crush it at the very beginning. I'm am not sure if a capitalist and a socialist stare can exist peacefully side by side. I mean Stalin and Mao bought into that theory with "Socialism in one country" and we saw how well that turned out. I hope Trotsky was wrong in his theory that it would require a world revolution to see socialism realized, but, honestly, I am not sure he was.

I guess that involves the murder of millions of people of the several decades that the communists controlled countries such as Cambodia, Soviet Union, and still control countries like China, North Korea and Cuba

Let us address your countries. Cambodia: First of all, Pol Pot denied the most basic tenet of Marxism when he said that the peasants were the proletariat and not the urban workers, that alone should disqualify him from being called a socialist. His actions were more in line with an extreme form of primitivis, than Marxism. Russia: Trotsky opposed the murders by Stalin from the start, he called on the workers to overthrow Stalin and institute a worker's democracy. Read the Revolution Betrayed. China: Haha! You are actually arguing that Marxists still control China? Wow. It a pure capitalst nation and the human rights violations still continue. Open a book and read about modern day capitalist China. North Korea: It has removed any and all references from Marxism, socialism, and communism from its constitution and does not even claim to follow them anymore, but follows Junche.

Finnaly there have been a lot of threads debating socialism and communism vs capitalism. I am happy to debate,however in these socialism 101 threads please don't try to derail them as you did. I responded because I'm not going to let your claims go unchallenged, but these threads are for providing information about the basics goals and principles of socialism.

already on my Ignore list, so I did not have to experience his or her diatribe. But I can imagine it. And I'm sure I would have responded in a similar vein to your response :)

and change the subject?

we're talking about communism

please don't change the subject

how many millions of people have been killed by communist regimes over the decades

and if you think I'm "derailing this", hit alert

Oh and according to a recent study 45,000 die from lack of health care every year in this country. There are some deaths from capitalism. Second of all google Augusto Pinochet, to see the deaths caused by capitalism, or look at modern day capitalist china and see the deaths they cause. Or how many people has our country killed it its wars of imperialism to satisfy the capitalist greed of the Military Industrial Complex.

how can anyone defend a system that has been responsible for the deaths of millions of people

I'm not defending capitalism in any way-I'm asking about communism

for every Pinochet, there are multiple Ceaușescus

Yes it has failed in the past, but guess what else has failed in the past? Democratic Republics have failed. The Roman Republic failed miserably and resulted in the rise of Caesar, the First Republic of France failed and gave us Robespierre and Napoleon and the Greek democracies often failed and gave rise to tyrants.
Did we give up on the idea of government by the people for those failures? No, because we realized that those were noble goals that could be achieved if we learned from the mistakes of the past. The idea of Socialism, that workers should control the means of production and with that their own lives, is a noble goal just like the idea that all people should have a voice in government, Both have failed in the past, but we didn't give up on Democracy and be content to live under autocracy, and neither should we give up and be content to live under the economic oligarchy of capitalism.

elaborated by the mature Marx in the years after The Manifesto is that this reduction of all heavenly chimeras to the brutal economic reality generates a spectrality of its own. When Marx describes the mad self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of self-fecundation reaches its apogee in today's meta-reflexive speculations on futures, it is far too simplistic to claim that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources the capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this "abstraction" is not only in our (financial speculator's) misperception of social reality, but that it is "real" in the precise sense of determining the structure of the very material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the "solipsistic" speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in a blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than the direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their "evil" intentions, but is purely "objective", systemic, anonymous. Here we should recall Etienne Balibar who distinguishes two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today's world 3: the "ultra-objective" ("structural") violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the "automatic" creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the "ultra -subjective" violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) "fundamentalisms" — this second "excessive" and "groundless" violence is just a counterpart to the first violence.

The fact of this "anonymous" violence also allows us to make a more general point about anti-Communism. The pleasure provided by anti-Communist reasoning was that Communism made it so easy to play the game of finding the culprit, blaming the Party, Stalin, Lenin, ultimately Marx himself, for the millions of dead, for terror and gulag, while in capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility, things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms, although capitalism has been no less destructive in terms of human and environmental costs, destroying aboriginal cultures… In short, the difference between capitalism and Communism is that Communism was perceived as an Idea which then failed in its realization, while capitalism functioned "spontaneously". There is no Capitalist Manifesto.

That, to quote Shakespeare, is the question...

think Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" functioned and continues to function as a de facto 'Capitalist Manifesto.' But that's a minor quibble.

as the most influential capitalist thinker ended with the rise of that greedy asshole Milton Friedman. If "Wealth of Nations" is the old testament of capitalism, then Friedman's works are the New.

Good reading.

:)

It talks about the relation of democracy and socialism.

Remove the dated references and it could have been written yesterday.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

This is the first I've seen of your series, white_wolf, but I am definitely going to check out all of your threads! I'm trying to learn more about socialism and communism, but it's hard to find good, clear information on it, so your work is much appreciated!

My first post in this series is in there. It covers basic dictionary definitions as well as some commentary where I feel that the dictionary doesn't explain things well enough. Let me know what you think.

It helped me to understand where we are in this country - and you can read it at this link free.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/