Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobcostas55 | Hacker News Reader

It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in the 50s. It's not like they could play the "well the USSR isn't _real_ communism!" card - for decades the CP had been a blatant Stalin worship cult, controlled and used by the Soviets. We are talking 25 years after the Holodomor was publicized in the West! How could they possibly rationalize this in their minds...

This guy wrote Fahrenheit 451 ffs, how could he square the ideas in that book with his support for that regime...

View on HN

They could rationalise it because they had been 1) lied to by western press and governments for decades and had no reason to trust anything they heard by the time of the Bolshevik coup, 2) lied to by the Stalinist regime by being invited in and presented an nicely dolled up image of the Soviet regime that contradicted what they were told by western press, thus further strengthening the idea they could not trust what they were told.

It's totally unsurprising that a lot of people were taken in - they were on one hand presented with people they trusted telling them they'd seen first hand what the Soviet state was accomplishing, and on the other hand seeing news media they had learned to see as liars confirm that impression by saying the opposite.

It didn't help to have had experiences such as the fawning many right wing elements did over Hitler before the war, or the way Western governments tried their hardest to prevent socialist volunteers from joining the International Brigades against Franco in the Spanish Civil War in the 30's - to many people this meant that the Western governments had no moral authority to speak against Stalin at that point in time; even many people who took issue with Stalin took more issue with Western governments for reasons such as that.

They of course have to be responsible for their own opinions, but why they ended up holding them is not that hard to understand in context.

(Then again, while some moderated themselves as Stalins excesses became accepted even in Soviet circles, as late as '94 I was in a heated exchange where a Norwegian Stalinist told me flat out that if he was in power I'd be in a gulag - some people genuinely believed the methods were justified)

I think it's because Communism is such a good idea on paper that intellectuals have a hard time admitting that it has been tested numerous times and the results are definitive: it doesn't work.

But looking at the idea on paper now, it seems obvious what the problem is: it requires unprecedented power to be put in the hands of a few despots with no oversight. What could possibly go wrong?

No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere.

Since you believe it is such a good idea on paper, perhaps you can describe to us what the idea actually is? Because either it will be blatantly obvious you don't know what the idea is, or it will be blatantly obvious it does not match any of the places you might try to claim it has been tried.

> it requires unprecedented power to be put in the hands of a few despots

A society with power put in the hands of a few despots by definition is not communism, as a society that concentrates power with one group has class rule, and communism by definition requires the absence of class divisions.

> No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere.

I think the experiments in Spain actually showed that it would work. Remember, anarchocommunism in Spain was violently crushed by fascists... after the Stalinists betrayed them.

Authoritarianism is authoritarianism wherever you go and its fruits are the same.

The interesting part about that episode is that both the West and the USSR acted to bring them down. Authoritarians on either side were scared of the implications of a functional, libertarian socialist society.

Experiments show that anarchocommunism works... in small groups, in larger, non-anarchocommunist contexts.

Which is to say it doesn't scale. At all. Rendering it pretty useless at the kind of scale its adherents postulate it at.

Experiments merely show that anarchocommunism attracts violence seeking to preserve authority. That is nothing new. Violence has always been the root of hierarchy. Whether it is the abolition of hierarchy or contention between old and new hierarchy, violence has always been the preferred cure and preventive.

Anarchism need not be seen merely as a state of a society. Anarchism can also be seen as a means, a method of collaborating with people. One can see anarchism everywhere in daily life and in struggles that are not specifically for the abolition of states. The root of the many anarchist political ideologies is the thought that a human being is best when she freely associates with her human beings and acts in collaboration with the world. As a method of being, it is useful even to people who care not to get involved in the grand affairs of the world.

Like many ideas and vegetables, the root of anarchism is perhaps its most useful bit.

If your form of government, or I guess in anarchocommunisms case form of non-government, can't protect and perpetuate itself then it isn't a very good system at all. It seems like that you are saying that anarchocommunisms failures aren't legitimate because they were stopped with violence and treachery. To a lot of people it seems like the entire point of a government is to organize ourselves into some form of hierarchy to protect ourselves against violence and treachery so anarchocommunism having not being able to do this is its ultimate failure.

First, it's a misconception that anarchists are against governance. They're against the "state," a hierarchical form of government. They didn't have difficulty organizing for defense/violence--in fact, a common criticism of the Spanish anarchist movement was the appropriation of farm land by force. The failure was due to the coordinated efforts of both capitalist democracies and authoritarian communists to impede their efforts at maintaining their society. Most importantly, IIRC, steel shipments from the US were halted, which reduced their fighting ability.

"Work" until it devolves into a tyrannical dictatorship, because a government you refuse to recognize as a government is the most dangerous form of government of all.

"No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere."

Then it is condemned by that too. If "psuedo-communism" kills millions, real Communism is so impractical and unhuman that it collapses so fast into tyranny and despotism that one needs specialized equipment from physics to measure its duration.

This is not to its credit as a practical system to run a country on.

AFAIK, aren't workers' co-op corporations an example of "Real Communism" existing, and thriving, in the small?

I would posit that while central allocation may have been discredited as an economic pursuit (outside, perhaps, of being something a Friendly AI might be capable of), the basic concept of earning the spoils of one's own labor is alive and well. Heck, we're moving toward it—fewer large corporations with layers of capital-suckling management, and more tiny networks of startups where each founder retains decent amounts of equity in (i.e. profits off of) their work.

My last paragraph wasn't extraneous. Many things work in the small that don't work in the large. One of the nice things about capitalism is that unlike ideological Communism, it does not insist that it is The One True System and that not only must the society be run on it but all subcomponents must be run on it. You are free in a properly capitalist society to build a communist commune if you like, or run a company that way, or run a company with competing departments, or anything else, and Capitalism remains pleasingly silent about how to conduct your family affairs. By contrast, Communism sticks its nose in everywhere and insists that it is the answer to everything, from running the entire country to how to raise your child. Unsurprisingly, something that tries to proscribe that much across that many orders of magnitude across that many domains fails miserably.

In code terms, Capitalism is an interface; it says how entities interact but doesn't specify the nature of the entities. Communism is a very fragile over-engineered over-implemented "we'll call you" framework that's wrong in numerous ways, but management (literally!) is forcing you to use it.

Does Communism really claim to be "The One True System"? I thought the argument is that Communism is just the inevitability of Capitalism?

It looks like the "well the USSR isn't _real_ communism!" card is still trying to be played today. And it is just as ridiculous.

Why is that ridiculous? The USSR was neither a classless nor stateless society. The means of production were owned by the state, nationalized, rather than owned by the workers, socialized. The USSR was about as communist as the United States Postal Service. A reading of Marx, Engels, or Goldman should make this evident.

The USSR is, at best, an example of a particular kind of Communism -- Leninism -- from which most attempted implementations of "Communism" have derived. Leninism rejected central structural elements of Marx & Engels Communism, as well as associated environmental prerequisites, in order to come up with something that fit the particular circumstances in Russia at the time -- for which Marx and Engels' model was not a fit.

Its an exercise in semantic line drawing as to whether it really counts as "Communism" at all, but its certainly a very different thing than Marx and Engels' Communism. (Leninism is at least as different from Marx and Engels' Communism as modern Western mixed economies are from the same reference point.)

I'm with ya brother but these arguments are way too reminiscent of how Christians console themselves.

It's not a good idea on paper, that's why it fails in practice and always will. It's a horrifically vile idea on paper, and far more so in practice. The results as you note speak for themselves.

If you wouldn't mind elaborating more, why is it a vile idea on paper?

AFAIK, every practical implementation of "communism" falls so short of the description, both ideal and transitionally, in things like The Communist Manifesto as to be blatantly lying when they use the name for themselves.

And then you have countries right now like China which blatantly abuse the label. (At the very least: If your country is engaged in capitalism, you are doing it wrong.)

>every practical implementation of "communism" falls so short of the description

And the same for Christianity or any other religion, but at least they had some positive outcomes.

The equivalent to your analogy would be a self-professed Christian worshipping an image of a goat and chanting "hail satan". There's a difference between merely failing as an imperfect human being and actively working against the ideology you supposedly support.

In order to say communism is viable it would be nice to have at least one success to reference. Former citizens of communist countries never cite its virtues, quite the opposite, only confused liberals in the West sing its praises.

That's an excellent statement of your opinion but a poor answer to my question.

It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in the 50s.

Though I personally could never ideologically support CPUSA, it's hardly "mind-blowing" to me why some would have stood for it back in those days, particularly in light of stances such as these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Party_USA_and_Af...

There are antiauthoritarian forms of communism. Of course, most who subscribe to the derivatives of Marxism laugh at such an idea, fully convinced that only if they were in charge would authoritarianism and hierarchy be abolished. To me, it is a very strange view. I never thought communism was a possibility until I stepped out of the cold war narrative.

> It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in the 50s. It's not like they could play the "well the USSR isn't _real_ communism!" card - for decades the CP had been a blatant Stalin worship cult

It was probably a lot easier and safer for heterodox (from the perspective of the Soviet-affiliated hierarchy) Communists to continue to network with each other within the CPUSA while maintaining a front of orthodoxy within the party outside of their own inner circles than to do so outside, especially given the political climate toward Communists -- without distinctions for variations within that category -- in the broader society.

That being said, nothing in the article indicates that Bradbury was a member of the CPUSA. It indicates that Martin Berkeley, a self-described former member of the CPUSA made a number of claims including:

* "That Bradbury was one of the more prominent writers of science fiction in the United States." (which, apparently, the FBI needed an ex-Communist informant to discover?)

* That Berkeley "felt Bradbury was probably sympathetic with certain pro-Communist elements in the WGAW" [0] (emphasis added)

* That Bradbury denounced supporters of a proposal to expel from the SWG those were Communists or who had asserted their Fifth Amendment rights before the House UnAmerican Affairs Committee as being "cowards and McCarthyites".

* That Berkeley perceived that "some of the writers suspected of having Communist backgrounds have been writing in the field of science fiction" and that "science fiction may be a lucrative field for the introduction of Communist ideologies" (emphasis added, in both quotes)

* That "some of Bradbury's stories were slanted against the United States and its capitalistic form of government".

So, basically, an ex-Communist described Bradbury as someone with (as far as he could describe) no clear Communist links, but who seems like he might remotely be sympathetic to Communist ideology because (1) he writes science fiction, and some other people who write science fiction are suspected (presumably, by the same ex-Communist) of being Communists, and (2) he's opposed to McCarthyism, and (3) some of his writings are read (by, again, the same ex-Communist) as opposing the status quo of the US government.

Its appalling -- but not surprising -- that any of that would be noteworthy and considered as evidence of any dangerous Communist leanings by any thinking person in the 1950s.

Its even more appalling -- and surprising -- that it would be treated as equivalent to membership of the CPUSA by any thinking person in the 2010s.

[0]"Writer's Guild of America, West", formerly "Screen Writer's Guild" (SWG)

To be fair, the speculative fiction novel is a very convenient platform for illustrating alternate political views. Bradbury, Orwell, Rand, and Heinlein are all technically science fiction writers.

Orwell wrote _Animal Farm_, which is basically one long allegorical denouncement of the Soviet revolution.

Rand is, of course, the founder of objectivism, and explicitly anti-communist.

Heinlein wrote _Stranger in a Strange Land_, _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, and _Starship Troopers_. Those describe cultures that are theo-communist, anarcho-capitalist, and stratocratic, respectively. I don't think they are endorsements, as the man himself was largely libertarian for most of his life.

So if Bradbury could be sympathetic to communists, he could also be sympathetic with Klingon High Command, rogue AC repairman Harry Tuttle, Dr. Zaius, and the pirates of Neverland.

The appalling thing is that no one involved in the investigation had the balls to tell their superior that there was no reasonable suspicion there, and it would be a violation of Mr. Bradbury's civil rights to continue with it.

> This guy wrote Fahrenheit 451

According to him, that novel was not about censorship:

> Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

> This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

> Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-mis...

So your point is somewhat misguided.

Its fair to say "What does this book mean to you?" I'd be confident that 99% of people asked would say "Censorship". So its fair to use it for a example of that.

I fully agee. My point is that it wasn't what the book meant to him.

There is nothing in the article that says that Bradbury was a member of the CPUSA.

edited to add -

“Only a few perceived the intellectual holocaust and the revolution by burial that Stalin achieved… Only Koestler got the full range of desecration, execution, and forgetfulness on a mass and nameless graveyard scale. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was therefore…true father, mother, and lunatic brother to my F.451.” - Ray Bradbury

> It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in the 50s.

The CPUSA is alive and well, and some intelligent people are probably members of it.

Do you long for the times of McCarthyism? This is your actual reaction to this? OK. :)

>Do you long for the times of McCarthyism?

McCarthy was a bit overzealous but honestly I don't see the issue with it. Imagine if North Korea had its own party in the US, a party that worshiped Kim Jong-Un, and NK was 100 times larger, and had tons of nukes, and murdered wayyy more people than it does, and had spies at the highest levels of US government.

What would you think of the people who belonged to this party? Would you work with them? Trust them with positions of power, authority, or influence?

> McCarthy was a bit overzealous but honestly I don't see the issue with it.

Some people are unable to learn from the lessons of others.

Remind me to turn you in as a communist / whatever in the next round of inquisitions. The accusation doesn't need to be true. It just needs to be seen as "not an issue" by people like you.

A bit overzealous?

"If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you've got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker." - Senator Joseph McCarthy

Unfortunately McCarthy wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, the gay stuff was particularly silly. On the other hand he was 100% right about the CPUSA, about soviet spies infiltrating the government, etc. Between Venona and the Soviet intelligence archives we know that he was spot on. The much-maligned HUAC even found the Soviets' most valued asset, Alger Hiss.

So yeah, a bit overzealous. The whole circus didn't last long, anyway.

Again, silly isn't the word I'd use here, however I guess, given you are also busy slandering Ray Bradbury as a Stalin apologist based on not properly reading a very short article, it is a bit petty in context to be too annoyed about your continual abuse of serious understatement.

Fortunately! He could have done a lot more damage if he was sharper and it would have taken longer for his contemporaries to come to their senses. Ditto Hitler.

you mean just like rape is a bit of surprise sex and typically doesn't last very long anyways, right ?

What would you think of the people who belonged to this party? Would you work with them? Trust them with positions of power, authority, or influence?

Well, it depends. Are they proposing things and doing a better job than the current turkeys?

That's what actually matters--everything else is just branding.

Well, as they say, intelligence is not the same as wisdom. Many intelligent people may well belong to communist parties in Western countries, but I don't think they are very wise.

(Just recently came back from a trip where visited Stalin's Canal. The GULAG killed there so many workers, intentionally, that they could be laid next to each other along the built-up parts of the canal, head next to the next body's toes, forming a linked chain of bodies buried in the embankments. This construction was where the Nazis visited to learn how to set up a forced labour camp and how to wear off people and kill them with hunger.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com