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Comment by bolololo12 | Hacker News Reader

France has strong communist influences, that's why it is how it is

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14321834 and marked it off-topic.

That's not Communism. Communism is when there's one single political party that rules with total authority and owns and finances everything. A bit of theatre protectionism does not a communism make.

It is the influence of communism and protectionism. Not sure which one is worst. France is full of both and had always close ties to Russia - they sympathies with them since 1920 (the early days of the worst disease of XXth century - communism). Communism killed more people, and enslaved even more, then any other disease.

You say it like Communism is a bad thing. Many people who have spent more than a moment thinking about it see the Communism scare for that it is - a scare tactic.

Many people who have lived under actual communist governments see communism for what it is - evil.

Many people who have lived under actual capitalist governments see capitalism for what it is - evil.

It is possible for communists to be evil but Communism can't be any more evil than anything else.

There is mismanagement of public money everywhere. There are people who abuse their position of power everywhere. I can agree if someone says it is impractical but to say it is evil is just misplaced anger.

Even if Communism is evil, it is still true that the people orchestrating the red scares were evil as well.

Marx and Engels might not have been evil but virtually all other communist thinkers / politicians were. You should go read the writings pre-Bolshevik revolution to get an idea. A big problem with Marxist thinking is that it encouraged pseudo-science and the belief that there was only 1 possible correct interpretation of history. So pre-Bolshevik thinkers competed for who was right, spiraling towards more and more extreme thinking, with the more strong-armed Lenin eventually winning out (and killing his rivals). What happened later was pretty inevitable once you understand the appeal of Marxism and understand that it's targeted at affluent intellectuals, not at the poor.

This is such a gross exaggeration. Were the Frankfurt School, many of whom were Jews who escaped the Holocaust, exploring how Capitalism gives rise to fascism through the lens of Marxism, "evil thinkers?" Are the democratically elected communist politicians in countries like Japan evil?

Bending over backwards to defend totalitarian regimes like the Soviets or CCP is obviously grotesque, but this kind of blanket pronouncement is about as nuanced as their thinking.

I wasn't aware that the Frankfurt School thought of themselves as communists. This is news to me. Can you refer me to any writings by them where they talk about this? Thank you.

Marxists.org has an archive of many of their writings:

https://www.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/

And Horkheimer is of course famous for saying, "If you don't want to talk about capitalism then you had better keep quiet about fascism."

That's irrelevant to whether they self-identified as Communists. The link you gave indicates that they didn't, quite the contrary.

Ah, apologies. I thought you were asking in good faith instead of trying to score some semantic point. In that case, you describe Marx as a "communist thinker", which would make the Frankfurt School(who were Marxists) communists by the terms of your categorization.

Why did you think this was a good-faith conversation when your assumption is that I was saying any Marxist sympathetic person is evil?

> You should go read the writings pre-Bolshevik revolution to get an idea.

Oh, if your just talking about Leninist vanguardism a d it's Stalinist, Maoist, etc. descendants, sure.

But that's not all of post-Marx Communist thought, and its a subset that shares common and fundamental deviations from Marx, and it's been criticized by non-Leninist Communists since day one.

IDK, in communist regimes generally it was the regime that was the evil part, not the economic system.

USSR bolshevism was just as evil (or even more so) during their 'new economic policy' (free market capitalism) years.

Revolutions establishing de facto dictatorships were just as evil as any other dictatorships, no matter if their economic policy in the end was communism, fascism or free market.

Revolutions creating a one party communist state were just as evil as revolutions creating a one party theocratic state or one of the many cult-of-personality fascist regimes that happened also long after ww2.

Revolutions or coups establishing oligarchies or committees running everything were, again, just as evil no matter what economic policy they run.

The evil of one group gaining power and slaughtering another group is the same no matter if the "othering" happened because of class warfare, religious hatred or ethnic cleansing.

It's just that in the 20th century communism was the most popular cause of regime changes resulting in such dictatorships and single ruling party systems, though nowhere near the only one.

You would be surprised at the amount of support communism (or other dictatorship) has in pay communist countries. The "former communist country citizem therefore against it" formula doés not work (for various reasons).

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