I can't agree with communism anymore.

[Comrade Mango]

Not sure if it goes here, but what the hell.
I've recently read a book. It was called Communism: a brief history, by Richard Pipes. To have it stated so plainly was strange.
I knew about the Purges, but to just hear it from it brought down my beliefs.

[ZeroNowhere]

You never did. Anyhow, you created a thread for discussion, so what topic or question do you wish to discuss?

[Impulse97]

Stalin never ran a communist country. He was a dictator. He shattered the ideals of communism and all that it stood for.

Don't take what he did as something that all communism stands for.:hammersickle::trotski::hammersickle:

[GPDP]

If you're going to renounce the ideal of communism because some assholes who called themselves communist did a bunch of terrible, categorically anti-communist things, then I question whether you ever possessed either sufficient knowledge or commitment to communism in the first place.

And of course, the question must be asked: if not communism, then what? A "happy medium" of capitalism with a happy face?

[Lunatic Concept]

Thats like a christian abandoning their beliefs because of the crusades.:confused:

[ZeroNowhere]

Y'know, this looks increasingly like something which shall descend into a flame-war.

[Comrade Wolfie's Very Nearly Banned Adventures]

Not sure if it goes here, but what the hell.
I've recently read a book. It was called Communism: a brief history, by Richard Pipes. To have it stated so plainly was strange.
I knew about the Purges, but to just hear it from it brought down my beliefs.

Off to OI with you then.

[red cat]

I can't agree with communism anymore.

Consider agreeing with anarchism then ? :D

[La Comédie Noire]

Dude you read Richard Pipes, you may want to consider the source before you change your whole political orientation.

He's not exactly considered a great historian by any measure.

[Red Commissar]

Richrad Pipes, yuck. I've seen his books before and read some selections of them, and most of them seem to be zomg evil genocidal empire, and he's no better than other anti-communist shitheads in that regard, like Robert Conquest or Figes. But as far as a historian goes he can't hold mustard.

He also makes two positions that I thoroughly disagree with:

-Russian people are inclined towards totalitarianism and restriction of liberties, due to their historical relation to land property and rulers in the past, and thus inclined to be freedom haters unlike people from Western Europe and 'murica.

-The Russian Revolution was not a popular uprising, but seemingly a coup orchestrated by Lenin and co. that was thrust upon the masses:


"Nothing in early twentieth century Russia inexorably pushed the country towards revolution, except the presence of an unusually large and fanatical body of professional revolutionaries. It is they who with their well-organised agitational campaigns in 1917 transformed a local fire, the mutiny of Petrograd’s military garrison, into a nationwide conflagration"

He also worked for the US intelligence services. He wrote this crap back in the 1970s and 1980s, and republished since then. There's a lot more credible sources for the Soviet Union, even among those who were anti-Communist, nowadays. His stuff is just neo-con trash.

Please look at the following thread:

Debate over Pipes, particularly ComradeOm's posts
http://www.revleft.com/vb/richard-pipes-t144650/index.html?t=144650

[GPDP]

He also makes two positions that I thoroughly agree with

Did you mean disagree?

[Red Commissar]

Did you mean disagree?

Well shit, thank you Robotnik. I feel stupid.

[Manic Impressive]

Some of you guys are bloody heartless this comrades having a few doubts and instead of trying to help him you want to send him straight to OI. Whether Stalin was or was not responsible for millions of deaths or whether he was the cause of the soviet union's failure it doesn't really matter communism has not existed yet so you can't hold previous failures of it's application against the actual theory. Perhaps you've just realized that Stalin was a douche in which case congratulations you've just joined the rest of us sane communists :thumbup:

[PoliticalNightmare]

So why are you here then? What doctrine do you subscribe to now that you feel communism has failed you?

[Lee Van Cleef]

Thank you, Red Commissar, for the only worth-while post in the thread.

Mango, Pipes is a renowned anti-communist and far-right propagandist that even most right-wing historians don't take seriously. I would advise you to seek out other accounts of the purges before taking his numbers at face value.

Furthermore, just because one man and his followers made some very bad decisions, does not invalidate Marxism as a whole. Has anyone ever said that the ideas of the great bourgeoisie thinkers were rendered null and void simply because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves? Of course not.

[GPDP]

Thank you, Red Commissar, for the only worth-while post in the thread.

Mango, Pipes is a renowned anti-communist and far-right propagandist that even most right-wing historians don't take seriously. I would advise you to seek out other accounts of the purges before taking his numbers at face value.

Furthermore, just because one man and his followers made some very bad decisions, does not invalidate Marxism as a whole. Has anyone ever said that the ideas of the great bourgeoisie thinkers were rendered null and void simply because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves? Of course not.

To be fair to my own post, I was not aware Pipes was such a vehement right-wing ideologue with a bullshit, if not downright racist thesis about how it is inherent in the Russian character to want authoritarian government forced upon them.

In any case, yes, the purges sucked. This does not inherently invalidate the idea of workers democratically running society.

[gorillafuck]

I don't see how the crimes of Stalin make capitalism a good system.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

To add to what Red Commissar posted; check this thread out, too -- especially ComradeOm's posts:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/bad-were-chekai-t146026/index.html

[Marxach-Léinínach]

Not sure if it goes here, but what the hell.
I've recently read a book. It was called Communism: a brief history, by Richard Pipes. To have it stated so plainly was strange.
I knew about the Purges, but to just hear it from it brought down my beliefs.

Read this and have your beliefs brought back up again - http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Ludo%20Martens/index.html

[Black Sheep]

Restriction missile launched.

[Impulse97]

Perhaps you've just realized that Stalin was a douche in which case congratulations you've just joined the rest of us sane communists :thumbup:

Bwahahaha win^^^

I concur with Manic, lets try and help him instead of bringing him down. We don't want to lose another one to the Capitalists!

[ComradeOm]

Red Commissar made the post that I was going to make. So blast. I'll not leave without boring you all to tears though...


To be fair to my own post, I was not aware Pipes was such a vehement right-wing ideologue with a bullshit, if not downright racist thesis about how it is inherent in the Russian character to want authoritarian government forced upon themGenerally Western writing on the Russian Revolution (excluding early works by hysterical emigres or blind fellow-travellers) tend to break down along two lines. The first is the conservative approach that views the Revolution essentially as a coup planned and carried out by a dedicated and secretive cabal of professional revolutionaries. Guided by Lenin's genius, and enabled by the naivety of the honourable Kerensky et al, they stole into power and inflicted their dictatorship on Russia*. Pipes is one of the more extreme proponents of this school but adds his own twist in which the Bolsheviks were direct descendants of Tsarism and a product of the innate Russian love of authoritarianism. Hence the labels of 'totalitarian' and 'triumphalist' (the latter common during the 1990s when it seemed that Russia had departed from its Sonderweg and joined the liberal democracies) that are typically applied to his work

The other line of thought is just as old (Rabinowitch forwarded the basic thesis in the 1960s) but it really gathered steam from the 1980s onwards. This 'revisionist' school takes a bottom-up approach through studying the social events and trends of the Revolution. As opposed to a near-exclusive interest in high-politics or intellectual currents. They have quite conclusively shown that the conservative interpretation of 1917 is deeply flawed and, IMO, entirely unsustainable. This is so much so that even recent works by the likes of Figes, whose attitude to the Bolsheviks is heavily influenced by Pipes, is forced to concede the popular nature of the Revolution

This breakdown does continue, albeit to a lesser degree, into the 1930s. For Pipes et al the Purges are a logical progression of Bolshevik ideology, while revisionists (of whom Getty has notably gone the furtherest... probably too far) explain them primarily in terms of interaction between state and society during an incredibly volatile period. Its also worth noting that a number of economic historians (such as Davies, Ellman, Wheatcroft, etc) have applied really good statistical approaches to this period which, in conjunction with archive evidence, have pretty much demolished the old figures of 20+ million deaths ascribed by Conquest and his ilk to the Stalin period. See my posts in this thread (http://www.revleft.com/vb/did-stalin-really-t145370/index.html)

*Ironically both Soviet and anarchist narratives use many of the same themes

[Rjevan]

Leaving the inevitable "$talinism = anti-communism!!111" comments aside (if you are interested in a different view of the purges, have a look at Marxach-Léinínach's link), I have to agree that Richard Pipes is not only a right-wing nutter but also a really bad historian. He probably comes right next to Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Glenn Beck on the list of "arch-reactionaries you definitely DON'T take serious on anything they say about communism."

[Misanthrope]

1) Richard Pipes is an American propagandist from the Cold War.
2) Communism has never existed.

You disagree with Stalin's actions, as do most of us here.

[Outinleftfield]

Thats like a christian abandoning their beliefs because of the crusades.:confused:

Not only that but that would make more sense. The Crusades actually conformed to what was said in the Bible.

Whereas Stalin, Mao, Kim Jung-Il followed nothing Marx said.

[NoOneIsIllegal]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
I read the Gulag Archipelago and, political differences aside, it was just awful. He uses an exclamation point every other sentence. I don't like being yelled at by books :crying:

[Antifa94]

Richard Pipes is a rightwing pig who frequently distorts and blurs the truth in order to promote his own neoliberal, right-wing objectives.
In fact, he states that the bolshevik reovlution was a coup d'etat. Statistics and accounts prove that allegation false. In response, Pipes was known to have said something along the lines of" fuck all of those statistics and scholarly monographs, the fact remains that there is no possible way that people would opt for communism!":laugh:

[Blackscare]

Wow a dude with like 20 posts makes an incredibly stupid thread, you all get riled up, and he doesn't make another single post in his own thread...


If only there were a word for this... how about goblining? :confused:

[RadioRaheem84]

Anyone who takes Richard Pipes seriously, cannot be taken seriously.

He is about as great a historian on Communism as his son is a great historian of Islam.

[Volcanicity]

Anyone who takes Richard Pipes seriously, cannot be taken seriously.

He is about as great a historian on Communism as his son is a great historian of Islam.
^ This.The phrase "like Father like son"was surely made for these two.

[Jose Gracchus]

Hey, why stop a gravy train when your father found a winning racket? The political background to Pipes is not as emphasized as it ought to be: he was one of the 'academics' in the Reagan and Future Bush II Junta's brain trust called "Plan B", which deliberately falsified intelligence and data figures to sustain the far-right hysterical line taken against the USSR in the 1980s. The traditional, slightly-more-plausible liberal line of rage against the "world-spanning conspiracy" (Kennedy) was no longer sufficient.

[Struggle]

If it takes a single book to bring down your beliefs, you were never a Communist in the first place.

[chegitz guevara]

Please look at the following thread:

Debate over Pipes, particularly ComradeOm's posts
http://www.revleft.com/vb/richard-pipes-t144650/index.html?t=144650

Can't agree enough.:thumbup1:

[maskerade]

Stalin was installed by the CIA to discredit communism. I thought everyone knew that.

[RadioRaheem84]

Conquest was installed by the CIA to discredit communism. I thought everyone knew that.

Edited for clarity.

[Diello]

Well, jeez. Hitler said he supported socialism, remember?

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
-Adolf Hitler, 1927

If you're going to reject ideas on the basis of the fact that some harmful individuals or institutions have claimed to endorse them, you're probably going to find that there are no ideas you can accept.

[scourge007]

Well, jeez. Hitler said he supported socialism, remember?

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
-Adolf Hitler, 1927

If you're going to reject ideas on the basis of the fact that some harmful individuals or institutions have claimed to endorse them, you're probably going to find that there are no ideas you can accept.
I thought it was funny how Glenn Beck used that quote or maybe it was another one , to say that nazis were on the same side as communists and socialists.:lol:

[LibertarianSocialist1]

This liberal should go straight to Opposing Ideologies.

[el_chavista]

Were it not for comrade Stalin's purges the careerists would just had vegetated in the nomenklatura. :lol:

[Sean]

I think Pipes (I've never read) has been dealt with pretty well but I was just wondering more about yourself. It almost strikes me that you're at the ideological window shopping phase of your life, normally around early-late teens. If that's the case, then by all means read up on various other ideas.

If theres one thing the world isn't short of, its people who have an idea how things should be done better. Go explore all the different corners of the ideological spectrum but please don't take with you that communism is racist because some guy wrote some things which are now obviously assholish.

We could save you a lot of bother and just compile a shitflinging dossier of everything disgustingly backward that founders of various schools of thought have written, left and right, but its kind of like telling you to avoid america because the founding fathers mumbled something about hemp farming and slavery. Anything written by a guy in a stovepipe hat or ZZ-top beard is rarely taken as immutable.
Good luck in your travels and learning anyway mate, take everything with a pinch of salt and use this thread's tearing apart of "I don't like cause some guy said" as a way of approaching everything else.

[Rafiq]

Then don't base your political beliefs on propaganda. Simply use logic and such to counter the bullshit that is put into books...

[Jazzratt]

This liberal should go straight to Opposing Ideologies. Thankfully that isn't your decision to make. Let's see what he has to say now the evidence is presented to him before we start screaming for blood, eh?

[Revolution starts with U]

clearly a troll post... i mean, come on.

[Unclebananahead]

I say we give him a chance to revise his outlook, after he's had a chance to read all of our posts responding to him.

[ComradeOm]

clearly a troll post... i mean, come on.Why? Unfortunately Pipes is taken seriously as an academic in the US and, for all his flaws, he is a professional historian. For many his works are they first that they will read on Russian history

Remember as well that this is Learning - a forum for helping people, not belittling them

[Delenda Carthago]

I saw a BBC documentary the other day that said that Mao was "worse" than Hitler and Stalin(Hitler and Stalin goes always together,right?)because the other two killed people for a purpose,while Mao killed people for his pleasure, so he has something to watch while eating.:laugh:

I m not playing,they said that!

[RATM-Eubie]

Im not a communist.....