New To This

[Stress Tha King]

Okay now real communism seems like a beautiful thing but how come when I see communist countries like Cuba, China, and Russia in tha (dread I say it) media they are always portrayed as countries where people are not allowed to voice their opinions and they look very poor in mind, body, and spirit. Is this the way your communism works or our we trying harder to perfect it? Not trying to offend anyone. Just want a better understanding on how communism all works.

[bezdomni]

When has the capitalist media ever told the truth? Cuba is easily the best country in Latin America, and China and Russia are both capitalist.

Go to http://www.freepeoplesmovement.org/cuba/index.html

Reading the Cuban constitution would also be a good way to understand their political system, and dismiss a lot of the lies about Cuban socialism.

[BobKKKindle$]

Ill just expand on something the previous poster said;

Many of the Countries that are, in theory, Socialist, such as the USSR, are in fact State Capitalist Nations. This means that the essential features of Capitalism are present - the workers do not have ownership or control over the means of production and society is still stratified through an economic or political class system - but instead of being owned by private Capitalists, the means of production are under the control of the state, and by exension, a managerial class of economic planners.

These countries are often better than Capitalist nations in some ways, as their professed adherance to socialist dogma means that employment is genreally garuenteed and basic services provided for free. However, these countries are often aslo associated with totalitarian and repressive power structures to an even greater extent than market capitalism.

In answer to your question, this is definetely not Socialism or Communism! The Revolutions that created these State Capitalist Countries were either imposed from the exterior (as in the Warsaw pact following WW2) or were brought about through a snall group of bourgeois intellectuals committing a coup d'etat - the October Revolution of 1917. See 'Leninism' for further details. Any Successful proletarian revolution must involve the majority of the working masses, or else a new power structure will simply be created which does not allow ordinary people to govern the world in which they live.

All Power to the Soviets! No Gods, No Masters! Welcome Comrade ;)

[apathy maybe]

I am sure that other people will be along shortly (if they have not already been) to point out that communism is a classless stateless society where goods are shared in common ... In which case there is no such thing as a communist country. Considering none of these countries every claimed to be actually communist (though they may have claimed a state ideology that was nominally "communist" or "Marxist"), but rather moving towards communism lends support to such a definition.

There are a lot of other threads about this topic around as well, but I really can't be bothered searching them out.

Have a look at some of the stickied threads (in Learning and Theory) for information about communism, or do a search in Learning. There is lots of stuff on RevLeft.


Originally posted by SovietPants
Reading the Cuban constitution would also be a good way to understand their political system, and dismiss a lot of the lies about Cuban socialism.Just because a country has a constitution does not mean shit. The USSR had a constitution also, fat lot of good it did. And the US constitution seems to be regularly ignored or interpreted in strange ways.