>There has never been a communist state. After the Revolution the USSR may have been moving that way but never got there. However close they may (or may not have) come, >they were completely derailed by Stalin. > >The USSR and every other so-called communist state were actually State-Capitalists. That is they were in fact capitalist however the means of production were owned by >the state rather than individuals or corporations (who are, as we all know, legal persons). > >So whatever happened to the USSR and the Warsaw Pact states, it wasn't happening to commies. > >Cheers, > >frank
In the West we like to over-simplify or idealize communism as some sort of communalism. Nothing could be further from the truth, John Lennon not being excused for his "imagination." They called themselves Communists. Lenin was the orthodox Marxist. Mao was an orthodox Marxist. Stalin maintained Lenin's system. Stalin killed 60M. Mao, at least 30M. Hitler, 10M+ Those three killed about 1/20 of the world population of the mid 20th c. Communism is about power. It was never about a touchy-feely community. Reading Marx' "Capital" he did not entirely oppose the existence of capital but the system under which it was managed. We just don't learn from history. Malthus was foundational to Marx. Though his predictions have failed on numerous occasions they are still being proposed as workable (eg, Sanger & the modern green movement). Lenin just couldn't make things work. (To his credit, though, he did clamp down on organized crime.) Look at PROC & Cuba? They survive because the feed off capitalism, just as do other forms of socialism. N. Korea, on the other hand, presents the world something much closer to Stalin's USSR. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
