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I just saw a great interview of Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton history professor. He's spent many years digging through Soviet archives and other primary sources a

• TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Of course they believed it, but nonetheless they were not actually heading towards it. How do you transition from a police state with a strong social hierarchy and monetary economic system to a stateless society with no classes or money overnight?
  • marcoperaza 11y ago
    They were doing exactly what Marx and Engels called for. Violent coercion and oppression is the only way to crush human individuality. Verbatim from The Communist Manifesto: Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. EDITORIAL: I presume rebels means anyone who isn't a communist 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
• mercurial 11y ago
  > It's a dangerous ideology fueled by envy and contempt. You should do some reading on the condition of the ordinary worker at the time Marx was writing. This would give you a more balanced perspective. By and large, communist movements were successful in countries where a small amount of people exploited the rest. > One in which each man exists only to serve the ends of society, another where each man is an end in himself. Except for part where Western governments have no issues with regimes where each man exists only to serve the ends of a few (most of Cold War South America, for instance). Not that I'm defending communism, which everywhere resulted in oppressive, inefficient and ultimately conservative bureaucracies, but there are good reasons while it was attempted in so many different places, and this wasn't solely due to USSR/Chinese/Cuban influence.
  • marcoperaza 11y ago
    I can't and won't defend all of the things that the West did to win the Cold War. Some were outright wrong. But some were pragmatic choices between two evils. Supporting Pinochet's coup in Chile is the most famous case. Interestingly, and conveniently left out of the narrative by those who want to demonize the West, the Chilean Congress authorized Allende's removal because he was flouting the law, was a totalitarian communist, and was a close ally of Castro. Pinochet then refused to relinquish power back to the congress. He was not a good man, and sent death squads to kill people for being suspected communists, but it probably would have been worse if Allende had his way. People overestimate the amount of power the US and the West had to influence those kinds of events. We could influence things one way or the other, but we didn't have a liberal democracy wand that would magically transform a country's political culture. We tried that in Iraq and it was a failure. You can draw analogies to the Spanish Civil War. Both sides sucked. Orwell went to fight for the Republicans, but came back completely disillusioned because the Republicans were totally dominated by the Soviet Union. He writes about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, which I strongly recommend. The Nationalists were not good people either, but Spain would have been much worse off if the Republicans won and turned it into a Soviet satellite.
    • mercurial 11y ago
      > We could influence things one way or the other, but we didn't have a liberal democracy wand that would magically transform a country's political culture. We tried that in Iraq and it was a failure. I'm not disputing that (well, unless you mean that the main point of the Iraq war was to bring Coca-Cola and democracy to the oppressed Iraqi masses). It's just that IMHO, most of each block's policy was about protecting their own political and economic interests, camouflaging such unpalatable truths under the guise of "freeing people from oppression". You certainly had people who believed in what they were doing, but IMHO, for most of the people pulling the levers, that was about knowing on which side the bread was buttered. > You can draw analogies to the Spanish Civil War. Both sides sucked. Orwell went to fight for the Republicans, but came back completely disillusioned because the Republicans were totally dominated by the Soviet Union. He writes about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, which I strongly recommend. The Nationalists were not good people either, but Spain would have been much worse off if the Republicans won and turned it into a Soviet satellite. It's ironic you write about the Spanish Civil War, considering that the main reason Stalin-backed communists got so much power was that the Republic was entirely dependent on them for weapons, largely in part due to the passive British support for Franco.