People don't go about saying "I'm a fascist, let's give it another go, maybe it will work this time, sorry about the millions of dead children".
So why do people think it's OK to say they're a communist?
Or maybe we're misrepresenting things a bit. I've never read a thing about having to kill 100 million working class people in any of the books about communism and anarchism I read. plenty of communist states survived without forgetting to feed their own people.
And the only communist states that survived without forgetting to feed their own people were the ones bankrolled by the USSR, for example eastern Europe and Cuba. The two biggest ones that did survive, the USSR and China, did in fact forget to feed their own people for a long time.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/56590
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara#Guatemala.2C_.C3.8... :
Later that month, Guevara arrived in Guatemala where President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán headed a democratically elected government that, through land reform and other initiatives, was attempting to end the latifundia system. To accomplish this, President Árbenz had enacted a major land reform program, where all uncultivated portions of large land holdings were to be expropriated and redistributed to landless peasants. The biggest land owner, and one most affected by the reforms, was the United Fruit Company, from which the Árbenz government had already taken more than 225,000 acres (91,000 ha) of uncultivated land.[47] ...
The overthrow of the Arbenz regime cemented Guevara's view of the United States as an imperialist power that would oppose and attempt to destroy any government that sought to redress the socioeconomic inequality endemic to Latin America and other developing countries. In speaking about the coup Guevara stated:
"The last Latin American revolutionary democracy – that of Jacobo Arbenz – failed as a result of the cold premeditated aggression carried out by the United States. Its visible head was the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a man who, through a rare coincidence, was also a stockholder and attorney for the United Fruit Company."[54]
Guevara's conviction that Marxism achieved through armed struggle and defended by an armed populace was the only way to rectify such conditions was thus strengthened.[57] Gadea wrote later, "It was Guatemala which finally convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism. By the time he left, he was sure of this."[58] "
just some context for the old refrain of "communism always leads to us capitalists whining about democracy." for you folks i dare you to read the next 40 years of Guatemala's peaceful capitalist history!
But you know what? There's this country called Guatemala, that for 10 years was kind of doing OK, and was a liberal capitalist society. But let's call it communist for the sake of the argument. They tried confiscating (not buying out, but straight out taking away) property from a very powerful player, after which the capitalist imperialist player started arming and training 500 men and telling fibs about the president on the radio. The 500 men failed militarily, but the army decided to surrender anyway. All of that cannot of course be evidence of a deeply embedded social instability and political apathy, but clearly shows that democracy doesn't work. We weren't talking about democracy at all, but there you go. So, yeah, if you disregard all of the above, we super-duper promise that Guatemala could have become a communist utopia. This "could've" of course invalidates all the deaths and misery communism inflicted upon the world in the extremely short period of time it existed, and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it isn't related to the endemic abuse of power and corruption that seems to follow it all the time, and totally works. We promise. Especially when it allows western people, who have never stood in a 3 km long line for toilet paper and have never gone hungry in the 20th century to feel morally superior by accepting 1st-world-guilt, yet being able to absolve oneself from any moral responsibility by shifting the blame to a cabal of disembodied corporations.
/s
So, you're OK with communist massacres?
The reason why the USSR was trumpeted as socialist was that it suited both sides' propaganda to do so. For the Americans, to vilify socialism, and for the Russians to give their rule the appearance of genuine socialism. When both of the major propoganda systems in the world agree on something it's bound to become a popular conception.
But let us not also forget that hundreds of millions starved in non-communist India, which suffered terrible famines up to 1948.
South and Central America was a horror chamber throughout the 1950's-1980's under violent brutal capitalist dictatorships supported by the USA. Many Asian countries too.
The rise of communism in China, although violent and of the state-socialist kind, also brought hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Before the market reforms china, wasn't... great.
From what I know it was the collectivisations of farmlands that caused great famines.
When land rights were re-established, poverty was reduced. People had an incentive improve the land.
Indeed, absolute world poverty has halved over the last 30 years because of state-socialism. Oops sorry, it was capitalism that halved poverty, not socialism. What a mistake to make!
Ah. the "No true Scotsman fallacy". It would be funny it it weren't for the countless millions of tortured and murdered women, children, peasants...
Right wing Marxists such as Bolsheviks have always had deep divides with left wing Marxists and anarchists.
Not even the Bolsheviks saw the USSR as a communist society. In fact, long after their coup, even Bolshevik ideologues were arguing about how many generations it would take before communism might be possible in the USSR.
Lenin, on introducing NEP in 1921 expected it to need to be in place for decades before even trying more far reaching socialist policies, much less communism.
Capitalism has been responsible for slavery, sweatshops, child labor, pollution, etc. On the other hand, it also brought us the iPhone, so it's not all bad ;)
If you have a central place to plan the economy to distribute via need, that place is going to be heavily concentrated in power. And due to human nature that tends to be abused.
Capitalism, and markets don't have a central place to plan to economy. Power is decentralised via companies, and production controlled via market incentives. You can have evil people as heads of organisations but their power tends to be limited.
Relying on people (government or corporations) to do the right thing won't work. You need a system that cannot fail by design. Some checks and failsafes to guarantee the worst cannot happen at the government or individual level.
As an example you can look at studies tackling accounting fraud. Whether the accountant is managing thousands or billions of dollars doesn't change his/her odds of stealing from the company much. Adding a second accountant to sign off on large purchases and check each other does.
Most advocates market economies really support those.
And this is why there is a left/right split within socialism, where the left wing - anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists/libertarian communists, and a wide range of people using similar terms - argue for decentralisation and voluntary association as essential to safeguard the success of a socialist revolution.
You will also find that a portion of these ideologies argue for market mechanisms to various extents. There is nothing inherent in socialism that demands central planning. In fact, in most left socialist ideologies there would be no central organ with the power to impose central planning.
Even right wing socialists like the Bolsheviks were ambivalent about centralised planning to begin with, and initially did so out of pressing needs: They imposed strict planning initially during the civil war because a lot of people - the vast majority of who had either voted for other socialist parties (SR and the Mensheviks both did vastly better with the peasants than the Bolsheviks did) or the bourgeois parties in the 1917 elections - didn't exactly go out of their way to help provide resources to the Bolshevik government. But as soon as the threat of the civil war was over, Lenin introduced "New Economic Policy" that liberalised the economy substantially, undid a lot of the centralisation and allowed for a limited market economy. Lenin indicated he believed NEP, or variations, would need to be in place for decades. It was Stalin that led the extreme centralization under the Bolsheviks, after Lenins death.
But in any case: In the case of the Bolsheviks, the abusive concentration of power started with their coup d'etat against the democratically elected socialist government after the Bolshevik losts the preliminary elections in 1917, not with their subsequent changes to the economic system; by then it was far too late.
> You can have evil people as heads of organisations but their power tends to be limited.
And this was a central aspect of the left/libertarian socialist/communist/anarchist groups criticism against groups like the Bolsheviks and theories like Lenins "democratic centralism" and idea of a "vanguard". It's a debate that raged already from the 1850's, and continued as the Bolsheviks and their associates started murdering left communists together with everyone else opposing them.
On the other hand there is difference between theory and practice, you can have any ideological system, but if you depend on totalitarian dictator everything can fall apart - You depend on mood of that person/party.
Just guessing ;-)
Bullshit.
That the hatred is on the much more versatile axis of class instead of race doesn't make it any less vile. You don't rack up a 20th century record of a bare minimum of 100 million slaughtered without exercising a lot of hatred.
You also need to consider what class means. It's basically behaviour: you are upper class if you exploit others. In that lens, it becomes ok to hate the upper class, but the upper class can change, it's not hated based on something inherent to the people that make it up, like "race".
Communism: kill millions of poor people for their politics.
Fascism and communism are the same thing, if you define them by how many poor people they torture and murder.
How many people were executed by organs of the state, including prematurely dying in forced labor camps, is a much more relevant metric.
No, it's a metric that perfectly reinforces the argument if that's the only metric you cherry pick and insist people use.
However, looking a bit further reveals massacres between 1945 to 1947. The Wikipedia article about his secret police has "A List Of People Assasinated" by them...
And since we are talking about cherry-picking, this is a problem I have with people claiming to be "on the left": this selective blindness to obvious horrendous crimes by the regime and abuse of power that these things lead to.
Because they can see that their beliefs have minimal relation other than a name and somewhat shared history with the philosophies behind those genocides.
Should we write off the term "democracy" because of places like the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea?
I guess you are unaware of the activities of Golden Dawn in Greece, or some of the more reactionary groups when meeting Syrian refugees in Europe etc. Or in the West Bank Kahanist hilltop settlements for that matter.
Until 10,000 years ago, the entire world was communist - not socialists saying they were working toward communism, but actual communism.
Is it OK for the communist hunter-gatherers in the Amazon wilderness to be the communists they are? Or should they get on their knees and say mea culpas for what some Laotian commissar did during a party purge half a century ago?