Countering Anti-Communist Bullshit

[the last donut of the night]

I know these threads are repetitive, but we learners need help.

I was recently talking to a friend, and revolutionary China was brought up as a subject. He began pulling the Red Scare horseshit, about how Mao killed 30 million people, he imposed collectivization upon the land, and that people were so scared of him they committed suicide in mass numbers. I doubt this is true, of course, but without more information I couldn't really counter his arguments. Can some of you guys help?

[lulks]

ask him to show evidence for all his claims, the burden of proof is on him, since he's the one claiming it.

[mikelepore]

People tend to "mix apples and oranges". Two separate things should be kept differentiated. The two separate subjects are:

(1) The fact of any government killing people has to do with the form of government. Governments that kill people lack democratic institutions.

(2) The question of the optimal economic system is a debate about whether industries should be run for a profit or nonprofit. We would get advantages from industry having a nonprofit charter.

The critic will often jumble these separate issues together and say, "You think an industry should be operated nonprofit? Don't you realize that's the same as killing a lot of people?" That's such a unintelligent habit. Almost no thought goes into it.

[Black Sheep]

Yeah, try to steer clear of historical debates when talking to people about leftism for the first time, or thick headed stubborn ones (red scare! blaaargh).

As the user above mentioned, try to make him propose the system which (s)he would find appropriate.If (s)he has common sense, his proposition will resemble a socialist state, on which you can comment and correct any flaws you can find.
Make the conversation a constructive one, instead of a historical judgement on stuff you cannot agree happened this or that way.

[Chambered Word]

He began pulling the Red Scare horseshit, about how Mao killed 30 million people, he imposed collectivization upon the land, and that people were so scared of him they committed suicide in mass numbers.

Fair enough, but committing suicide in mass numbers? That sounds like verbal diarrhea to me.

[bailey_187]

Well, i am sure you are well rehearsed on the facts? Its just how to articulate them in person?

Just anticipate what will be asked, said, claimed about Mao, Communism etc before.

Like with the 30million number thing - im guessing you read Jospeh Ball's Monthly Review on this? Just learn some of the key bits (e.g. the 30million number comes from Judith Banister blah blah blah). Because obv you cant say "read this article"

You could also come back with other facts e.g. famines before Mao - no famines after. How the death rate was the same in China with a famine in Mao years and India in normal years, how death rate in Maoist China in famine was lower than death rate of China before Mao in no famine year

[Glenn Beck]

Ask him why it is that when capitalist governments do fucked up shit they are generally explained as being due to unrelated issues like "ethnic strife" or just the particular politicians in power, in effect those governments were just a few bad seeds that don't reflect on the whole. But when a Communist government allegedly does something nasty it's supposed to throw the entire theory and practice of Marxism into question for all time.

[Barry Lyndon]

There are a few ways you can counter this:

First, that figure of 30 million(I have heard 40 or even 50 million alleged), is based on unreliable demographic methods. It was reached by contrasting projected population growth rates to actual population growth rates. In other words, people who were not even born are counted as part of the death toll(even Jung Chang, in her footnotes to 'Mao, the untold story' admits this).

Second, a decrease in population does not necessarily translate into deaths- there were a series of natural disasters in China in this time period, so there was a considerable amount of mass migration going on. With a country the size and population of China, such movements of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people is not unlikely.

Third, as a previous poster has pointed out, feudal China had recurring problems with famine long before the Communists came to power. It is estimated that due to famine and drought caused by the Taiping rebellion, China's population dropped by 60 million from 1850-73. This was followed three years later by a famine in northern China that wiped out another 20 million people. And millions more Chinese died in famines in 1907, 1911, 1936, and 1943.

But it was the Communists who ended famine for good(capitalist restoration in China may bring it back, however). The Communists, by setting up collective farms with food pantries accessible to all, as well as their system of 'barefoot doctors' under the umbrella of a universal health care system, actually saved tens of millions of lives.

[Sir Comradical]

I suppose what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Chomsky mentions China in the book 'Rogue States' citing Amartya Sen's analysis of China's political history while comparing China's social achievement's to that of India. Check that out.

[AK]

Ask him why it is that when capitalist governments do fucked up shit they are generally explained as being due to unrelated issues like "ethnic strife" or just the particular politicians in power, in effect those governments were just a few bad seeds that don't reflect on the whole. But when a Communist government allegedly does something nasty it's supposed to throw the entire theory and practice of Marxism into question for all time.
'Cos commies hate our freedom and liberty. Private property = freedom and liberty.

[nuisance]

Try not to stand up for disgusting arseholes like Mao, it'll make you look like a prick.

[the last donut of the night]

Try not to stand up for disgusting arseholes like Mao, it'll make you look like a prick.

I'm not standing up to any leaders. What I'm standing for is truth in the face of bourgeois propaganda. Whatever ideology in the radical left you follow, and whatever criticism you have of the USSR or China, you have to dismiss these lies because they're used as smears against socialism in general. Us accepting them, like so many leftists do, makes us look stupid -- that we can't do anything. We have to mention the great accomplishments of socialism, as much as they are countered by defeat and reformism. So I'm defending the legacy of socialism and its ideals, not Mao.

[Lyev]

Well, I don't anything is so simple. For a second, let's dismiss the speculations on the amount of deaths under Mao. Did you know, at the time of revolution in 1949 life expectancy was roughly 35 years and then, when Mao died in 1976, life expectancy was just over 70? Also, at the time of revolution, illiteracy in China was roughly 80%, then in 1976 it was down to about 7%. And, something else about this sort of thing, it's not as if Mao went around China shooting each and everyone of these people himself. Whilst I'm generally fairly hostile towards figures like Mao or Stalin, it's fair to say neither were blood-thirsty, brutal dictators.

[bailey_187]

http://thisiscommunism.org/

good site for countering anti-communist stuff

[Tavarisch_Mike]

30, 40, 50? comrades you all know that Mao killed 70 million people!
No but seriosly its kind of weird that the numbers are allways so wide spreaded and thats because, Like Barry Lydon allready wrote, that the way of messure its allways different and many times just pathetic like when they caunt unborn as murded.
Ok all the smart things have allready been said like that the socialism ended faime in China, doubled the average lifetime, reduced the birth mortality and i personally recomed that you read moore about the comparing betwen China and India, wich is the only country that fairly can be compeared with the chinise development. During Maos era unemployment was extingted, they also made sure that publical transportation would reach even the moost remoted areas, the state even prowied evry citizen with a bicycle. But he also had crazy projects like he wanted to kill all the sparrows in the country, that project ended up by making the whole eco-system fucked up.

[Jacobinist]

I know these threads are repetitive, but we learners need help.

I was recently talking to a friend, and revolutionary China was brought up as a subject. He began pulling the Red Scare horseshit, about how Mao killed 30 million people, he imposed collectivization upon the land, and that people were so scared of him they committed suicide in mass numbers. I doubt this is true, of course, but without more information I couldn't really counter his arguments. Can some of you guys help?

Dont let him frame the debate and be the one asking the questions, you ask him and you move the debate in a direction you can argue effectively.

[CartCollector]

I agree with Jacobinist. There's many, many examples of the US backing reactionary regimes that kill lots of people, and killing lots of people itself. Go look some examples of those up and then ask him about what he thinks about them. Stalin and Mao aren't the only leaders with skeletons in their closets.

[Glenn Beck]

Try not to stand up for disgusting arseholes like Mao, it'll make you look like a prick.

Yeah, that works great, just automatically concede that everything these people have heard about socialism is true, except say that it's not "true socialism". That works great, until they logically deduce, as most people do (because most people aren't idiots) that "true socialism" by your definition has had a 100% failure rate and the overwhelming majority of "socialist" movements have been, according to you, frauds that are entirely as bad as the propaganda they have been taught tells them they were. From this they will quite logically conclude that socialism is fatally flawed as an idea because every attempt to establish it fails to live up to "true socialist" ideals and figure that it's a waste of their time to even think about it because it's clearly impossible.

Alternately, you can simply avoid the issue altogether by not claiming to be a socialist or a communist and just advocating progressive issues and ideas without labeling them. Then inevitably somebody is going to call you on your shit and red-bait you and you aren't gonna have shit to say because after all they are right, you're not being completely honest about what you believe.

Just ask your local trade unionists how well avoiding labels and scary terms has helped them avoid being red-baited and marginalized. Just adapting to the mainstream ideology definitely works great.

[scarletghoul]

on the death toll -

First, these death tolls are always exaggerated, for obvious propaganda reasons. Second, attributing them all to Mao is stupid and shows a lack of understanding of what happened. Certainly his mistakes played some part in the deaths of the Great Leap Forward, but you have to take into account there was a series of severe natural disasters as well as the Sino-Soviet split, which devastated China's economy. As for the other political deaths, most of those were carried out at the grassroots level by the angry peasantry who wanted to kill the big landlords who had exploited them for generations (Mao spoke out against these excesses, in fact. But, not having complete control, he was unable to prevent many of them.), and some were killed by overzealous Red Guards and other activists, who while inspired by Mao, were not directly carrying out his orders.

It was a revolution, there were many tragic deaths, but to attribute them personally to Mao as a "mass murderer" is just idiocy. In the words of Mao- “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Furthermore, if the idiots who make these claims that Mao ’killed millions of people’ applied the same standards to capitalist regimes as they do to communist ones, Queen Victoria and Nehru and many many other capitalist leaders would be among the worst mass murderers in history. For example, there are 25,000 children starving to death every day due to capitalism (ie, there is more than enough food to feed them, but they are not fed because it is not profitable). Why aren’t the capitalist leaders blamed for these deaths and considered mass murderers ?? The 50 million or so deaths (wrongly) attributed to Mao are surpassed by capitalists in jut a few years. Double-standards, see.

It's also worth noting the lives saved by Mao and the Communists' policies. This is shown most vividly by the fact that under Mao life expectancy more than doubled. He also repelled the Japanese invasion and defeated the Kuomintang, both of which were forces of intense murder and suffering upon the people.
Its also great to point out how much capitalism sucks and has killed many more than even the craziest estimates of communism. For example "suicidie in mass numbers" is occuring constantly in India right now, due to the inhumanity of the capitalist system. Estimates put it as over 100,000 per year http://www.maithrikochi.org/india_suicide_statistics.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India quite interesting

And yeah most importantly get him to try and back up his claims as they are most certainly untrue

[redwog]

I think that when arguing communism to anti-communists, the focus should be around why you want communism in the first place. To end your own exploitation.

It is not because Mao's China proves it correct because it lifts life-expectancy and literacy. Saddam did that, and indeed capitalism can take similar credit.

Communism is a solution to the exploitation of the working class. Capitalism is premised on the expropriation and extraction of value from workers which is never paid for. This is what you need to be trying to convince you friend about.

Inevitably, even if he accepts that capitalism is not in our interest, his position will still lead him to believe that capitalism is the best we've got because communism failed. This is still a more softened position than his current one.

If you can open the door to acceptance that capitalism is exploitative, you may be able to redefine communism as, rather that an ideological basis for rule, a process for liberation. Being a process, it is imperfect, yet not bound by limitations. Indeed its expression (which no-one can actually ever predict) is shaped by those who create it. Revolutions are the act of the working class. They express certain desires at certain times. And they all happen within the context of capitalism, until it is ruptured.

[Robocommie]

Ask him why it is that when capitalist governments do fucked up shit they are generally explained as being due to unrelated issues like "ethnic strife" or just the particular politicians in power, in effect those governments were just a few bad seeds that don't reflect on the whole. But when a Communist government allegedly does something nasty it's supposed to throw the entire theory and practice of Marxism into question for all time.

This has occured to me so many times. There's a double standard for Marxist movements. Che Guevara executes a couple hundred people attached to a brutally repressive regime and he's a butcher and a monster. The US drops a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima killing thousands of innocent civilians and it's "a sad but necessary evil."

Bomber Harris, etc.

[Barry Lyndon]

Glenn Beck: Yeah, that works great, just automatically concede that everything these people have heard about socialism is true, except say that it's not "true socialism". That works great, until they logically deduce, as most people do (because most people aren't idiots) that "true socialism" by your definition has had a 100% failure rate and the overwhelming majority of "socialist" movements have been, according to you, frauds that are entirely as bad as the propaganda they have been taught tells them they were. From this they will quite logically conclude that socialism is fatally flawed as an idea because every attempt to establish it fails to live up to "true socialist" ideals and figure that it's a waste of their time to even think about it because it's clearly impossible.

Alternately, you can simply avoid the issue altogether by not claiming to be a socialist or a communist and just advocating progressive issues and ideas without labeling them. Then inevitably somebody is going to call you on your shit and red-bait you and you aren't gonna have shit to say because after all they are right, you're not being completely honest about what you believe.

Yeah, I was a 'state-capitalist' Cliffite affiliated with the ISO for a while but with time I became disillusioned with their arguments, for the very reasons you described. One of the big turn offs for me is that they didn't even have the balls to use the word 'communist' in their publications, shamefully caving in to McCarthyist demonization of the word.
I see no problem with conceding that there were/are evil and dictatorial communist leaders, but I make that assessment in a case by case basis in the course of my own investigation and research of scholarship on the topic, not by simply swallowing whole the capitalist media's presentation of them, which I presume to be lies(or, at best, half-truths) unless proven otherwise.
It astonishes me how many of those who consider themselves on the left will badmouth the revolutions in Russia, China, and Cuba without knowing a damned thing about what actually happened in such countries.
There is also another interesting double standard that exists among purist leftists. While there is no such thing as a developed capitalist country which is entirely free-market, in that most have some sort of social safety net geared toward the public sector, and some even have a degree of workers management(ie Argentina), we still consider such a country capitalist. However, any inequalities or lack of workers control means that a communist country is "not socialist". Basically, socialism is held to this impossible standard of perfection that capitalism never is.

[CartCollector]

While there is no such thing as a developed capitalist country which is entirely free-market, in that most have some sort of social safety net geared toward the public sector, and some even have a degree of workers management(ie Argentina), we still consider such a country capitalist. However, any inequalities or lack of workers control means that a communist country is "not socialist". Basically, socialism is held to this impossible standard of perfection that capitalism never is.
Capitalists do this as well, especially the more ancappish ones. If some government does any sort of taxing, spending, or regulation, especially if it does a Keynesian bailout of large industries or financial firms, all of a sudden it's not really a 'free market' and all of the economy's problems can be attributed to the 'socialist' Nanny State making people lazy.

[Barry Lyndon]

I posted this on another forum. A counter to those who hit you with that 'Communism killed 100 million people' crap.

My estimates:


Extermination of indigenous Americans 1492-1890: 100 million
Atlantic slave trade of Africans 1500-1870: 15 million
French attempted repression of Haiti slave revolt 1791-1803: 150,000
French conquest of Algeria 1830-47: 300,000
The Opium Wars in China 1839-42 & 1856-60: 50,000
Irish potato famine 1845-49: 1 million
British suppression of the Indian Mutiny 1857-58: 100,000
Massacre of the Paris Commune 1871: 20,000
Famine under British colonialism in India 1876-79 & 1897-1902: 29 million
Military and police repression of labor strikes in the United States 1877-1938: 700
Blacks lynched in the United States 1882-1964: 3,445
Belgian exploitation of the Congo 1885-1908: 10 million
United States conquest of the Philippines 1898-1913: 250,000
British concentration camps in South Africa 1899-1902: 28,000
French exploitation of Equatorial African rainforest 1900-40: 800,000
German extermination of the Herero and Namaqua 1904-07: 65,000
The First World War 1914-18: 10 million
White Army pogroms 1917-20: 100,000
Italian fascist conquests in Africa 1922-43: 600,000
Japanese imperialism in East Asia 1931-45: 10 million
Fascist terror in Spain 1936-39: 200,000
Nazi terror/concentration & extermination camps 1939-45: 25 million
Allied bombing of German and Japanese civilians 1942-45: 1 million(inc. over 200,000 Japanese in atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
Kuomintang massacre in Taiwan 1947: 30,000
French repression of anti-colonial revolt in Madagascar 1947: 80,000
Israeli colonization of Palestine 1948-present: 30,000
British repression of the Mau-Mau revolt 1952-60: 50,000
Algerian war of independence 1954-62: 1 million
Military juntas in Guatemala 1954-96: 200,000
Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier regime in Haiti 1957-86: 50,000
Vietnam War 1963-75: 3.4 million
Massacre of communists in Indonesia 1965-66: 1 million
Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City 1968: 400
US bombing of Laos and Cambodia 1969-75: 700,000
Nicaragua civil war(s) 1972-90: 80,000
Pinochet dictatorship in Chile 1973-90: 3,197
Angola civil war 1974-92: 500,000
East Timor massacres 1975-98: 200,000
Mozambique civil war 1975-90: 1 million
Argentina "Dirty War" 1976-82: 30,000
El Salvador military dictatorship 1980-92: 70,000
Bophal Union Carbide disaster 1984: 16,000
US invasion of Panama 1989: 3,000
UN embargo against Iraq 1991-2003: 1 million(inc. 500,000 children under the age of 12)
Destruction of Yugoslavia 1992-95: 200,000
Capitalist coup de tat in Russia 1993: 2,000
Rwandan genocide 1994: 800,000
Congolese civil war 1997-present: 6 million
NATO occupation of Afghanistan 2001-present: 30,000
US invasion and occupation of Iraq 2003-present: 1.2 million

TOTAL: 221, 441, 742 victims of capitalism

[Jacobinist]

I posted this on another forum. A counter to those who hit you with that 'Communism killed 100 million people' crap.

Just to point one thing out, Comrade On told me the African slave trade and extermination of natives in the Americas, was not kapitalism. I vehemently disagree with him, but just putting that out there.

Also, 100 million Native Americans in 5 centuries? I think it should be much higher, esp. if you consider the Americas to be from Canada to Chile's most southern tip.

[ZeroNowhere]

There is also another interesting double standard that exists among purist leftists. While there is no such thing as a developed capitalist country which is entirely free-market, in that most have some sort of social safety net geared toward the public sector, and some even have a degree of workers management(ie Argentina), we still consider such a country capitalist. However, any inequalities or lack of workers control means that a communist country is "not socialist". Basically, socialism is held to this impossible standard of perfection that capitalism never is.
Capital. It's a social relation, you may have heard of it. It is not dependent on free markets, and it doesn't mind co-ops all that much, either.

Do we hold that socialism is, "an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single labour force," hence making labour directly social? Well, yes. Sorry about that, of course. Nonetheless, to be fair, people like Paresh Chattopadhyay make the point that these 'socialist' countries featured the social relation of capital, featuring wage labour and generalized commodity production, with reciprocal separation between industries. This would seem a fair point, unless perhaps we're applying a double standard in claiming that socialism is not capitalism, which is certainly a very cogent point.

Thing is, though, socialism and capitalism are two different systems based on different social relations. Capitalist society can remain so without free markets, and socialist society without legalized abortion, because neither form a part of the fundamental social relations of each society. On the other hand, you can't have capitalism without capital, without wage labour; likewise, you can't have socialism with wage labour or generalized commodity production, or without democratic social control of production and directly social labour. There is no double standard present here, just two social systems, one of which happens to be prevalent in the world presently.


Try not to stand up for disgusting arseholes like Mao, it'll make you look like a prick.Very opportunistic. I personally have always preferred, however, "This above all: to thine own self be true."



Communism is a solution to the exploitation of the working class. Capitalism is premised on the expropriation and extraction of value from workers which is never paid for. This is what you need to be trying to convince you friend about.I've always found it effective to point out the character of capitalism as a rule of things over people, and that's especially relevant during the present crisis.


Yeah, that works great, just automatically concede that everything these people have heard about socialism is true, except say that it's not "true socialism". That works great, until they logically deduce, as most people do (because most people aren't idiots) that "true socialism" by your definition has had a 100% failure rate and the overwhelming majority of "socialist" movements have been, according to you, frauds that are entirely as bad as the propaganda they have been taught tells them they were. From this they will quite logically conclude that socialism is fatally flawed as an idea because every attempt to establish it fails to live up to "true socialist" ideals and figure that it's a waste of their time to even think about it because it's clearly impossible. [Italics added]Indeed, 'tis a simple modus ponens deducation.

[Barry Lyndon]

When the DeLeonists have a revolution, let me know. They aren't called 'Impossiblists' for nothing.