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Spartakus
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Topic: Differences between communism and Soviet communism? Posted: 07-May-2005 at 15:06 |
Are there any differences between the theory of communism and it's practise by the Soviet Union?
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Kynsi
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Posted: 07-May-2005 at 15:27 |
For my understading the Soviet Union was quite the opposite of what Marx intended.
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forget the past then you are blind in both eyes -old russian saying
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Posted: 07-May-2005 at 19:08 |
Originally posted by Kynsi
For my understading the Soviet Union was quite the opposite of what Marx intended. |
True.
Marx wrote "Das Kapital" for advanced countries' proleterian masses(esp.:german and english...), not for Russian farmers who couldn't get rid of feodal economy, yet.
Communist theory claims the dictatorship of proleteria (social class of workers)-you agree with this or not-but what Moscow made was a dynasty of high bureaucracy which even the Tzar couldn't imagine.
"The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" was not sovietic, nor socialist. They were just united by the new tzars of Moscow. The system was just turned into a Russian rascism. Hundreds of thousands of Uzbeks, Khazaks, Crimean Turks, Tatars, Kyrgizes, Turkmens and other ethnicities exiled and massacred throughout Russia.
Just in the beginning, we can see that Russians weren't cordial about the revolution: They signed on an trade(!) agreement with Britain in 1919, but with the very commercial(!) agreement, soviets agreed on not making propaganda of communism in English colonies who were suffering from capitalist-imperialist policies of the English dynasty. So this was the very revolution of Bolsheviks.
Conclusion, Russia advanced America's military technology, propaganda skills, poltical strenght, etc.
Just days to the declaration of "preisteroica(~)" one of the advisors of Gorbachev said to an American (jounalist probably): "We'll do a very bad thing to you, you'll have noone against to keep the entire world within your hands."
Edited by YAFES
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Tobodai
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Posted: 07-May-2005 at 21:39 |
yes according to Marx societies have to go through several phases before going to communism, and that communism would be the next step for advanced capitalist nations, Russia was hardly an advanced capitalsit nation so Marxist view Soviet differences with true communism as a result of national immaturity to an extent.
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Perseas
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Posted: 09-May-2005 at 16:42 |
Communism, as it was practiced by ex-USSR, it was a bastardization of Marxist ideals. Mostly because i think the ideal Marxist form doesn't account for the unknown factor which invisibly influences all of society and government and is called human nature.
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Kalevipoeg
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Posted: 10-May-2005 at 17:50 |
Basically, Russian communism composes of ultra-nationalism, which is not a part of socialism by Marx and also composed of an even more powerful elite in the head of the state, creating the same old worker-elite relationship and despise towards eachother as it was before the revolution. Only the fact in the times before and after the revolution is, that after the communists, the working class got massacred and repressed for almost consecutive 20 years of hell. How can history books even call the "Cold War" a grudge between capitalism and communism then when the commies were not commies at all?
Edited by Kalevipoeg
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Posted: 11-May-2005 at 10:38 |
Originally posted by Kalevipoeg
How can history books even call the "Cold War" a grudge between capitalism and communism then when the commies were not commies at all?
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Good point
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Belisarius
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Posted: 20-May-2005 at 19:35 |
From what I understand, the Soviet government was more 'socialist' than
'communist'. There are no ruling officials in what Marx intended.
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Kalevipoeg
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Posted: 21-May-2005 at 05:27 |
Yea, i think if Marx would have seen the world in about 1960., he would not have understood if Amercia was more communistic or the Soviet Union!
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Posted: 22-May-2005 at 00:44 |
The Soviet Union was working towards but never actually acheived true communism... Belisarius is right that it was more socialist than communist. I wouldn't say it was the opposite of what Marx intended, though, it was more of a work-in-progress.
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iskenderani
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Posted: 22-May-2005 at 01:32 |
Communism .... is an utopia ( as a political theory ) . Appllied communism ...was a disaster..
Isk.
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Posted: 22-May-2005 at 06:25 |
Originally posted by Tobodai
yes according to Marx societies have to go through
several phases before going to communism, and that communism would be
the next step for advanced capitalist nations, Russia was hardly an
advanced capitalsit nation so Marxist view Soviet differences with true
communism as a result of national immaturity to an extent. |
Yep, Russia was mostly a feodal country at that time. Only 1.5%
(according to some statistics) were urban workers. Most people were
still peasants, and there was hardly any capitalist class. So what
happened in 1917, was not what Marx predicted to happen.
Before the 1917 revolutions, there was also another communist group
called Mensheviks, who believed that Russia should first become
capitalist and industrialised in order to become a real communist
state. I think Trotsky was their member for awhile, but then changed
his site to the Bolsheviks.
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Illuminati
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Posted: 22-May-2005 at 15:58 |
Communism is a great idea on paper. But its ability to be implemented implemented is merely hypothetical.
Soviet Communism is what you get when you try and implement it.
Edited by Illuminati
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The Golden Phallanx
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Posted: 22-May-2005 at 21:40 |
Originally posted by Belisarius
From what I understand, the Soviet government was more 'socialist' than 'communist'. There are no ruling officials in what Marx intended. |
True communism is socialism. True that there are no officials to judge what and what not is in full and true accordance to Marx's ideas; of course, one does not have to be an official to be able to tell that the Soviet Union was the farthest thing the philosopher wanted. The dial which was meant to be extreme liberalism broke through the end and landed in extreme conservatism, thus the opposite came from what was intended.
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Posted: 22-May-2005 at 22:20 |
Are there any differences between the theory of communism and it's practise by the Soviet Union?....
There are irreconcilabe differences.
First, there was no well developed theory of communism. Currently there are theories of communism that are quite detailed in their descriptions of institutions, but there was nothing comparable at that time. In the young Marx, there is an interesting grounding of the premises of a communistic philosophy in a theory of human nature, to be found in the posthumously published Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and The German Ideology (with Engels). The closest that Marx came to defining the institutions that might be compatible with his communist ideals was in his posthumously published Grundgrisse, yet even those formulations are schematic. His work in politico-economy is almost entirely a withering critique of capitalism, rather than a positive theory of communism.
Marx's 'theory' of communism is an aspect of the overrarching materialist conception of nature and history that informs his mode of explanation. We can't credibly refer to an implementation of "Marx's communism" anywhere without recognizing that he presumed three fundamental prerequistes for a transitional socialism: 1) the development of productive forces sufficient to effectively mitigate the problems associated with natural scarcity, 2) the development of an internationalized worker's movement capable of effective complementary strategies against their common class enemy, 3) in the cultural dimension, the fomenting of revolutionary consciousness among the international working class. He thought that the development of these objective and subjective conditions, nurtured by capitalism's inherent tendencies towards crises, could lead to the establishment of transitional socialism to be followed by a communism which reflects an even more radical change in human nature. Whether one agrees or disagrees, those were his basic conditions.
...now what of the Bolsheviks? I think the following excerpt succinctly describes their difficulties...given the conditions that were inherited, the demise of the german revolutionary socialist project was a devastating blow to the Soviet experiment...
" In these desperate conditions the Bolshevik party came to substitute its own rule for that of a decimated, exhausted working class that was itself a small fraction of the population, and within the party the growing apparatus increasingly edged the membership from control. All this is incontestable, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the actual situation had rather more influence on these developments than the very nature, structure and ideology of the party. As a matter of fact the party regime was astonishingly liberal in this period.
The most balanced summary of the matter is that of Victor Serge, himself a communist with strong libertarian leanings, an eyewitness and a participant,
It is often said that the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse, and which he may have carried in him since his birth, is this very sensible?
Given the backwardness of Russia, which germs flourished and which stagnated, which of the several potential outcomes actually materialized, depended above all on the international situation.
The Bolshevik seizure of power took place in the context of a European revolution. The revolutionary movements proved strong enough to overthrow the German Kaiser, the Austrian Emperor and the Turkish Sultan as well as the Russian Tsar. They proved strong enough to prevent a foreign intervention sufficiently massive and sustained to overthrow the Soviet regime, assisted of course by the conflicts between the remaining great powers. But they were aborted or crushed before the critical transition, the establishment of working class power in one or two advanced countries, was reached. The failure of the German revolution in 1918-19 to pass beyond the stage of the capitalist-democratic republic seems, in retrospect, to have been decisive. The defeat of the Spartacists sealed the fate of working class rule in Russia, for only substantial economic aid from an advanced economy, in practice from a socialist Germany, could have reversed the disintegration of the Russian working class." (Duncan Hallas, Toward A Revolutionary Socialist Party)
Edited by Darwin
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