06-14-2011, 09:14 PM
There seem to be No True Scotsmen left in your world. If Lenin, Castro, Trotsky, Mao, Stalin, Tito, Ceausescu, Pol Pot, and so on are *all* excluded from "true" Marxism, then we have been left with nothing but an ahistorical husk, an idea entirely severed from its body.
What Marx believed is not difficult to track down. While an interesting and original, if somewhat muddled thinker, he was not a pleasant man. A violent uprising followed by an indeterminate period of dictatorship by the working class and their (self-)appointed representatives (of which he was one himself), accompanied by a gradual disassembly of capitalism, is exactly what he called for. It is also what was tried, over and over, in Russia, in China, in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Yugoslavia. It has never worked. It has never come close to working. It has nearly always been accompanied by astounding bloodshed, extraordinary repression, and perhaps most hilariously, income inequality surpassing most modern capitalist democracies.
We can wait for our Communist New Jerusalem if we like, but we can't jettison its history, and the history is ugly.
-Jester
What Marx believed is not difficult to track down. While an interesting and original, if somewhat muddled thinker, he was not a pleasant man. A violent uprising followed by an indeterminate period of dictatorship by the working class and their (self-)appointed representatives (of which he was one himself), accompanied by a gradual disassembly of capitalism, is exactly what he called for. It is also what was tried, over and over, in Russia, in China, in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Yugoslavia. It has never worked. It has never come close to working. It has nearly always been accompanied by astounding bloodshed, extraordinary repression, and perhaps most hilariously, income inequality surpassing most modern capitalist democracies.
We can wait for our Communist New Jerusalem if we like, but we can't jettison its history, and the history is ugly.
-Jester