Communism

[criminaltrap]

Hey, I've pretty new to all this, so please forgive me if this seems like a stupid or obvious question.
Why was the Soviet Union, China etc. not communism?
i.e. what made them not communist?
I see a lot of places that communism has never really existed anywhere, but history lessons at school tell me different.
Cheers :)

[Clarksist]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13, 2007 04:31 am
Hey, I've pretty new to all this, so please forgive me if this seems like a stupid or obvious question.
Why was the Soviet Union, China etc. not communism?
i.e. what made them not communist?
I see a lot of places that communism has never really existed anywhere, but history lessons at school tell me different.
Cheers :)
We get this a lot, and yeah maybe a simple search would have negated the need for a post, but I never search before I post, so I'm not gonna bust your balls on this one.

The Soviet Union and "Red" China weren't/aren't communist. Now, historians have often incorrectly labeled them thusly because of two main factors:

1. An astounding ignorance of Marxist theory (despite deeming themselves experts).
2. The fact that the parties in power both had the word "Communist" in them.

Now, what Marxist theory says is that the proletarian (industrial workers, the exploited class) after revolting against the bourgeois (the exploiting class) set up a socialist government. This means that the workers democratically control the means of production, and the state presides over equalizing the wealth, thus eliminating the multi-class structure under capitalism. Now that classes don't exist, the dictatorship of the proletariat (the proletariat ran government under socialism, as opposed to the bourgeois ran government under capitalism) has no reason to exist as it is clearly in no position to coerce any members of the bourgeoisie into "proletarianization". This is what Marx described as the state "whithering away".

This is the turning point to communism. No state, no classes, equality, freedom, happiness, etc.

Now, Russia revolted under the leadership of Lenin. Lenin critiqued Marx's theory by saying that the revolution will never happen in first world countries with defined proletarian and bourgeois classes. Think about it, would the US be able to revolt? So, he proposed that capitalism could be "skipped". In other words, the giant leap into industrialization could be controlled by a ruling "Communist" Party that would guarantee worker's rights. Thus he created a state-ran capitalist society with very generous social programs. Most of it never came to full fruition because of economic realities of a post-revolution third world country which is mostly covered in barren snowy Siberia, and also because of a counter revolution, and of course Stalin's control after his death.

In China, Mao decided Lenin was right, except that it shouldn't even be so much a worker's revolution (because China had no real proletarian class, even compared to Czarist Russia), but it should be peasant ran, and the warfare should include guerrilla tactics and be fought on the revolutionaries' terms. And once again even the mild "socialism lite" of Mao's China didn't completely come to fruition based on, little industrial infrastructure, and Mao's repeated disasters that go by the names of the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution". Wiki those, by the way.

So yeah, whenever a history teacher tries to tell you about the Commie countries, explain to them the ignorance in the statement "Communist State" and how the Leninist and Maoist revolutions never ended in communism.

However, there is a silly little rule of "big C" Communism and "little c" communism. The difference is that Communism is the Leninist, Stalinist, and Maoist forms, while communism is the proper Marxist form of the word. This is a pretty big bullshit stance since most historians and scholars either capitalize the word always or never. So defend communism, but if someone brings that up, call them a misleading douche bag.

[ComradeR]

Thus he created a state-ran capitalist society with very generous social programs.

Uhh the goal of Leninism is to destroy capitalism not reform it, it became a totalitarian state in the late 20s (thanks to Stalin) and a state capitalist nation in the early 50s.

Wikipedia has got an alright piece on Leninism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leninism


In his book What is to be Done? (1903), Lenin argued that the proletariat can only achieve a successful revolutionary consciousness through the efforts of a Communist Party comprised of full-time professional revolutionaries. Lenin further believed that such a party could only achieve its aims through a form of disciplined organization known as democratic centralism, wherein Communist Party officials are elected democratically, but once they are elected, all party members must abide by their decisions.

Leninism holds that capitalism can only be overthrown by revolutionary means; that is, any attempts to reform capitalism from within, such as Fabianism and non-revolutionary forms of democratic socialism, are doomed to fail. The goal of a Leninist party is to orchestrate the overthrow of the existing government by force and seize power on behalf of the proletariat, and then implement a dictatorship of the proletariat. The party must then use the powers of government to educate the proletariat, so as to remove the various modes of false consciousness the bourgeois have instilled in them in order to make them more docile and easier to exploit economically, such as religion and nationalism.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is theoretically to be governed by a decentralized system of proletarian direct democracy, in which workers hold political power through local councils known as soviets (see soviet democracy).

Imperialism
One of the central concepts of Leninism is the view that imperialism is the highest stage of the capitalist economic system. Lenin developed a theory of imperialism aimed to improve and update Marx's work by explaining a phenomenon which Marx predicted: the shift of capitalism towards becoming a global system (hence the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!"). At the core of this theory of imperialism lies the idea that advanced capitalist industrial nations increasingly come to export capital to captive colonial countries. They then exploit those colonies for their resources and investment opportunities. This superexploitation of poorer countries allows the advanced capitalist industrial nations to keep at least some of their own workers content, by providing them with slightly higher living standards. (See labor aristocracy; globalization.)

For these reasons, Lenin argued that a proletarian revolution could not occur in the developed capitalist countries as long as the global system of imperialism remained intact. Thus, he believed that a lesser-developed country would have to be the location of the first proletarian revolution. A particularly good candidate, in his view, was Russia - which Lenin considered to be the "weakest link" in global capitalism at the time.[citation needed] At the time, Russia's economy was primarily agrarian (outside of the large cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow), still driven by peasant manual and animal labor, and very underdeveloped compared to the industrialized economies of western Europe and North America.

However, if the revolution could only start in a poor, underdeveloped country, this posed a challenge: According to Marx, such an underdeveloped country would not be able to develop a socialist system (in Marxist theory, socialism is the stage of development that comes after capitalism but before communism), because capitalism hasn't run its full course yet in that country, and because foreign powers will try to crush the revolution at any cost. To solve this problem, Leninism proposes two possible solutions.

One option would be for the revolution in the underdeveloped country to spark off a revolution in a developed capitalist nation. The developed country would then establish socialism and help the underdeveloped country do the same. Lenin hoped that the Russian Revolution would spark a revolution in Germany; indeed it did, but the German uprisings were quickly suppressed. (see Spartacist League and Bavarian Soviet Republic)

Another option would be for the revolution to happen in a large number of underdeveloped countries at the same time or in quick succession; the underdeveloped countries would then join together into a federal state capable of fighting off the great capitalist powers and establishing socialism. This was the original idea behind the foundation of the Soviet Union. What differentiates this from Maoism is that under Leninism, even in the underdeveloped countries, the urban proletariat remains the main source of revolution.

But it's best to go to the original source and read the writings of Marx, Lenin etc, a good source where you can find these is here. (http://www.marxists.org/)

[Clarksist]

Uhh the goal of Leninism is to destroy capitalism not reform it

Granted. But what he created was state ran capitalism.


it became a totalitarian state in the late 20s (thanks to Stalin) and a state capitalist nation in the early 50s.

Also, you can't blame it all on Stalin. I mean, it was Lenin who exclaimed that freedom of speech was a bourgeois ideal.

Lenin was no great leader, and he failed to bring about anything more than tyranny. So don't go around blaming Stalin for capitalizing on the state bureaucracy Lenin created.

Also... the 50's was hardly when the USSR became "state capitalism", that seems to be assuming it was socialist before. It always was just state ran capitalism.