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Chapter 4 of the communist manifesto should help clarify:

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

https://www.marxists.org/archi...

More sources here if you want to read everything about how Karl Marx proposed creating a dictatorship of the proletariat:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Notable in there is Marx's rejection of the Gotha Program. Also pay attention to what Engels says about authoritarianism. Remember, he co-wrote the communist manifesto.

"the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."

https://www.marxists.org/archi...

Make no mistake about it: This IS the language of a would be dictator. He even talks about having a concentrated power structure to boot.

Communist revolutions work by terrorizing and then enslaving (putting into forced labor and forced indoctrination) the local population until it bends to the will of the communist party.
Democratic revolutions are the total opposite: They focus on liberating the local population without forcing them to favor any particular political leader or party.

Sure, Marx will talk about having elections (as most dictators do) but even if this does happen, the moment anybody speaks against his principled ideals and gains any kind of traction among the general public, Marx will label them as counter-revolutionary and have them killed and/or decide that the population isn't "educated" enough in a concept that Marx literally invented himself using a very flimsy basis for an argument that it will work. So the election process, if there is one at all, will be severely restricted.

By Karl Marx (they love this guy in China, BTW).

https://www.marxists.org/archi...

I
Bruno Bauer,
The Jewish Question,
Braunschweig, 1843

The German Jews desire emancipation. What kind of emancipation do they desire? Civic, political emancipation.

Bruno Bauer replies to them: No one in Germany is politically emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How are we to free you? You Jews are egoists if you demand a special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. As Germans, you ought to work for the political emancipation of Germany, and as human beings, for the emancipation of mankind, and you should feel the particular kind of your oppression and your shame not as an exception to the rule, but on the contrary as a confirmation of the rule.

Or do the Jews demand the same status as Christian subjects of the state? In that case, they recognize that the Christian state is justified and they recognize, too, the regime of general oppression. Why should they disapprove of their special yoke if they approve of the general yoke? Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?

The Christian state knows only privileges. In this state, the Jew has the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rights which the Christians do not have. Why should he want rights which he does not have, but which the Christians enjoy?

In wanting to be emancipated from the Christian state, the Jew is demanding that the Christian state should give up its religious prejudice. Does he, the Jew, give up his religious prejudice? Has he, then, the right to demand that someone else should renounce his religion?

By its very nature, the Christian state is incapable of emancipating the Jew; but, adds Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated. So long as the state is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, the one is as incapable of granting emancipation as the other is of receiving it.

The Christian state can behave towards the Jew only in the way characteristic of the Christian state â" that is, by granting privileges, by permitting the separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but making him feel the pressure of all the other separate spheres of society, and feel it all the more intensely because he is in religious opposition to the dominant religion. But the Jew, too, can behave towards the state only in a Jewish way â" that is, by treating it as something alien to him, by counterposing his imaginary nationality to the real nationality, by counterposing his illusory law to the real law, by deeming himself justified in separating himself from mankind, by abstaining on principle from taking part in the historical movement, by putting his trust in a future which has nothing in common with the future of mankind in general, and by seeing himself as a member of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people as the chosen people.

On what grounds, then, do you Jews want emancipation? On account of your religion? It is the mortal enemy of the state religion. As citizens? In Germany, there are no citizens. As human beings? But you are no more human beings than those to whom you appeal.

Bauer has posed the question of Jewish emancipation in a new form, after giving a critical analysis of the previous formulations and solutions of the question. What, he asks, is the nature of the Jew who is to be emancipated and of the Christian state that is to emancipate him? He replies by a critique of the Jewish religion, he analyzes the religious opposition between Judaism and Christianity, he elucidates the essence of the Christian state â" and he does all this audaciously, trenchantly, wittily, and with profundity, in a style of writing that is as precise as it is pithy and vigorous.

How, then, does Bauer solve the Jewish question? What is the result? The formulation of a question is its solution. The critique of the Jewish questi

Chairman Maoâ(TM)s Theory of the Differentiation of the Three Worlds

Used to be that once married a woman was pretty much your servant, legally required to have sex with you as often as you reasonably desired, cook and clean, give you children and raise them etc.

This is a bit of a simplification.

Here is some interesting reading from around 1907.

Some excerpts

Let us first take our existing marriage laws. We shall find that in England whilst the woman is practically relieved of all responsibility for the maintenance of her husband, he can be compelled by poor law to maintain her under a penalty of three months’ hard labour for leaving her without provision, should she choose to apply to the parish. On anything that by latitude of interpretation can be deemed ill-usage or neglect, she can, if rich, obtain judicial separation with alimony from the divorce court, or, if poor, a magisterial order for separation with weekly maintenance from the police court. Jackson versus Jackson has decided that a wife can leave her husband at will, that he cannot raise a finger to compel her to remain with him or to come back, neither can she be imprisoned for contempt of court for refusing to obey an order for restitution of conjugal rights; in other words, it is decided that the contract of marriage is the single case of a contract which one of the contracting parties is at liberty to break without reason given, and without compensating the other party. But it is well to remember that it is only one of the parties that has this liberty, for Bunhill versus Bunhill gives the wife the right to follow an absconding husband and break into his house, if necessary, for the purpose of compelling cohabitation. He, on his part, is precluded by the decision in Weldon versus Weldon from obtaining restitution of conjugal rights even by way of action; he is liable, however, for his wife’s postnuptial torts, so that she has only to slander or libel some person without his knowledge or consent, and whilst she comes off scot free, even though possessed of property, the husband can be cast in damages. Trespass to land, trespass to goods, injuries done through negligence, all these actions coming under the legal definition of “torts,” render the husband liable, no matter what private wealth the wife may possess.

Turning now from the civil law to the criminal law, we find a similar – or even greater – disparity of treatment. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, of course, whilst flogging, the tread-mill, and other brutal forms of punishment have been retained for male offenders, they have been abolished for females, so that though a man may be subjected to torture and degradation for mere breaches of prison discipline, a woman is exempted from them for the most heinous crimes. As happened a few years ago in Ireland, a woman may torture her children to death and there is no outcry for the lash, yet surely if you do not flog the female child-torturer you have no right to flog any other human being. The sex-favouritism of modern penal law is made more conspicuous by the ever-recurring howl of the “base, bloody, and brutal” grand juror for the lash to be applied to new classes of offences (for men of course). But the most atrocious instances of sex-privilege occur in connection with the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Whilst the abduction of a girl under eighteen, or the seduction of one under sixteen, involves the man concerned in serious penalties, the girl or the woman gets off scot free, and this even though she may have been the inciting party. This is carried to the extent that a young boy of fourteen may be himself induced to commit a sexual offence by a girl just under sixteen – that is to say, nearly two years his senior – and he can be sentenced to imprisonment, followed by several years in a reformatory, whilst the law holds the inciting girl absolutely

I think the GPU should be open, but you do have to realize that the Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie (GPU) hasn't been around since the Soviet Union ended decades ago (in fact, it merged with the NKVD back in the '30s.)

https://www.marxists.org/archi...

Because this is about Section 7 activities, which is about unions. Unions are a form of socialistic governance. Even actual Marxist socialist claim this. I personally see that unions are needed to push back against corporate worker rights violations, and without them there would be no overtime, we'd still have child labor, and a whole host of what amounts to corporate slavery. No union in the USA is advocating any socialistic overthrow of the government anymore; my citation is from 1936. And of course not all socialism is Marxist in nature, nor is it authoritarianism automatically. I'm a Sanders supporter, and I know his ideas are not in any way Marxist. But still, there is a very real historical joining here.

Oh, come on, cite the Marxist definition, it's so much more fun:

A trend in bourgeois philosophy which declares natural (empirical) sciences to be the sole source of true knowledge and rejects the cognitive value of philosophical study. Positivism emerged in response to the inability of speculative philosophy (e.g. Classical German Idealism) to solve philosophical problems which had arisen as a result of scientific development.

https://www.marxists.org/refer...

See, a bourgeois operating system for a bourgeois philosophy.

From https://www.marxists.org/archi...

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

> complete disregard for her oath.

She didn't take an oath you stupid Republican liar. She isn't in the military, and she isn't the President yet. Maybe you took one, but that doesn't mean everyone else did. Why do you Republicans constantly project? You think just because your kind is stupid and violent that everyone else must be. Well, we aren't. We are not you. Not. No way. Not in any way. And, stop with that spew of lies about Hillary. It is very telling that she is so innocent that you have to lie to try to attack her.

As usual, Republicans have nothing on her so they make-up ridiculous fantasies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVxLzs4YQPY

This links to footage of Hillary Clinton taking the oath of office as the Secretary of State

https://www.gutenberg.org/
https://mises.org/library/books
https://www.marxists.org/archive/index.htm
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/index.html

Here you go kid. read some books learn something

This is a beautiful post.

Bloom is explaining how investors view the market. You re-interpret it as if it represents the Obama administration. Nicely done. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would be proud of you.

Don't you have FEMA concentration camps to find? Or contrails to track? Or welfare queens who are really prostitutes to bust? Are you finding evidence on the intarwebs that 9/11 was an inside job?

Seriously though, you should read Animal Farm. Here: https://www.marxists.org/subje... Pay attention to how the farm's ideals get re-interpreted.

There are real problems with the Obama presidency. Making shit up keeps everyone from talking about them, helps them and hurts everyone else.

Oh, he didn't? You can keep on reading then. https://www.marxists.org/archi...

"Gradually, particularly over the past 75 years or so, most of these aspects of the original governmental structure have gradually been overruled -- often in the name of "democracy" or "protecting the people" or providing aid and help to the poor through a central system."

Without this helping the poor capitalism would have fallen, let's be honest here. The american/Europe/English capitalist governments all had these problems because capitalism is fundamentally irrational at based reflecting the irrationality of mankind. All these changes were required to keep the capitalist system going. Say what you want but Lenin was correct about imperalism being the highest stage of capitalism.

http://www.marxists.org/archiv...

The reality is human beings just aren't intelligent enough to form long lasting social orders because too many people have negative evolutionary characteristics they've inherited from the past. Our primate psychology is at the root of everything regardless of what collection of words and labels one flies under. The biology is still there.

Okay, I'm open for suggestions at this point. Horses, maybe?

Citizens selected by lot. It worked in Athens.

Unrelated to the thread at hand, apologies I didn't see it earlier as this very much is the kind of thing I'd chime in on especially in regards to feminists very skewed ideas of history.

Would just like swing you something nice to read that may take your interest, shows how little some things have changed.

Very little to do with the site it comes from, it's well written. here

A small excerpt from towards the end of the piece:

Nowadays any one who protests against injustice to men in the interests of women is either abused as an unfeeling brute or sneered at as a crank. Perhaps in that day of a future society, my protest may be unearthed by some enterprising archaeological inquirer, and used as evidence that the question was already burning at the end of the nineteenth century. Now, this would certainly not be quite true, since I am well aware that most are either hostile or indifferent to the views set forth here on this question. In conclusion, I may say that I do not flatter myself that I am going to convert many of my readers from their darling belief in “woman the victim.” I know their will is in question here, that they have made up their minds to hold one view and one only, through thick and thin, and hence that in the teeth of all the canons of evidence they would employ in other matters, most of them will continue canting on upon the orthodox lines, ferreting out the twentieth case that presents an apparent harshness to woman, and ignoring the nineteen of real injustice to man;

do a small group of elite men dominate society for their own interests?

What if they see "giving women what they say they want" as part of their interests?

Some interesting reading from the past (1907) here.

Let us first take our existing marriage laws. We shall find that in England whilst the woman is practically relieved of all responsibility for the maintenance of her husband, he can be compelled by poor law to maintain her under a penalty of three months’ hard labour for leaving her without provision, should she choose to apply to the parish. On anything that by latitude of interpretation can be deemed ill-usage or neglect, she can, if rich, obtain judicial separation with alimony from the divorce court, or, if poor, a magisterial order for separation with weekly maintenance from the police court.

Jackson versus Jackson has decided that a wife can leave her husband at will, that he cannot raise a finger to compel her to remain with him or to come back, neither can she be imprisoned for contempt of court for refusing to obey an order for restitution of conjugal rights; in other words, it is decided that the contract of marriage is the single case of a contract which one of the contracting parties is at liberty to break without reason given, and without compensating the other party. But it is well to remember that it is only one of the parties that has this liberty, for Bunhill versus Bunhill gives the wife the right to follow an absconding husband and break into his house, if necessary, for the purpose of compelling cohabitation. He, on his part, is precluded by the decision in Weldon versus Weldon from obtaining restitution of conjugal rights even by way of action; he is liable, however, for his wife’s postnuptial torts, so that she has only to slander or libel some person without his knowledge or consent, and whilst she comes off scot free, even though possessed of property, the husband can be cast in damages. Trespass to land, trespass to goods, injuries done through negligence, all these actions coming under the legal definition of “torts,” render the husband liable, no matter what private wealth the wife may possess.

Turning now from the civil law to the criminal law, we find a similar – or even greater – disparity of treatment. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, of course, whilst flogging, the tread-mill, and other brutal forms of punishment have been retained for male offenders, they have been abolished for females, so that though a man may be subjected to torture and degradation for mere breaches of prison discipline, a woman is exempted from them for the most heinous crimes.

As happened a few years ago in Ireland, a woman may torture her children to death and there is no outcry for the lash, yet surely if you do not flog the female child-torturer you have no right to flog any other human being. The sex-favouritism of modern penal law is made more conspicuous by the ever-recurring howl of the “base, bloody, and brutal” grand juror for the lash to be applied to new classes of offences (for men of course). But the most atrocious instances of sex-privilege occur in connection with the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Whilst the abduction of a girl under eighteen, or the seduction of one under sixteen, involves the man concerned in serious penalties, the girl or the woman gets off scot free, and this even though she may have been the inciting party.

This is carried to the extent that a young boy of fourteen may be himself induced to commit a sexual offence by a girl just under sixteen – that is to say, nearly two years his senior – and he can be sentenced to imprisonment, followed by several years in a reformatory, whilst the law holds the inciting girl abs

It's a straightforward manipulation of demand to increase demand for your particular labor.

Which is an idea that the kooks endorsed and popularized, at least in part. So you're really agreeing with me.

And you have yet to make your point.

No, I made it. You just don't know it.

You first said you don't need a 19th century kook to explain what happened. I pointed out that kook is the one who popularized the idea of manipulating markets. You call the market "supply and demand", but that's just a lack of nuance on your part.

Again, we're basically in agreement. I simply provided more nuance than your stance that the kooks had no place in the explanation.

And you would be in error to make that claim. It is rather the relative lack of interference (even including the effects of protectionism and the modern social state) from modern governments that is unusual compared to the historical record.

No, you're the one in error. The Civil War and the following Reconstruction was huge interference compared to before. Apparently Marx even wrote a letter to Lincoln cheering him on to keep going.
http://www.marxists.org/archiv...

.. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property

You need to engage in further study of Chairman Mao's "On The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People", comrade. Your approach in argument is brash and will alienate members of the masses who might become class-aware and join the people's struggle if proper tactics are taken. Please prepare your Self Cricitism for our next meeting.

It sounds kinda, I don't know, "Scientific"...

Sure, it sounds 'scientific.' But just Social Science, which is ideology cloaked in scientific jargon.

Here's a textbook for you. So you don't have to start from scratch.

The opening line of Karl Mark's book...

It's an excerpt from Marx' Critique of the Gotha Programme.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then [sic] can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! [Emphasis added]

The point being that To each according to his contribution was necessarily to be the appropriate principle until that higher phase be accomplished! I.e. simply the elimination of exploitation (in the technical Marxist sense of that word). As you say, don't believe everything people tell you about Marx and, I would add, be careful about taking these slogans out of context. Our friend here seems especially to have had his recall of reading of Kapital (or was it Grundrisse?) coloured by popular misconception.

The system we use says that the "free" in "free market" means anyone can participate ...

Well ... that 'free' means many things to many people. I certainly agree that it implies a freedom of anyone to participate free from qualification (apart from having the requisite wealth). IMO it requires additionally (or perhaps essentially) that the buyer and seller are free to agree between themselves on the price. Thus the market for theatre tickets is a free market only when it involves a scalper.

What you say about China is insightful and often forgotten. Not that I'd want to live under their system mind ...

This line of industrial engineering robot displaced 18,000 low-skilled jobs and replaced them with around 200 high-skilled jobs (maintenance techs). Those other 17,200 went into the service industry or construction ...

Also, in a truly shocking occurrence, 600 people managed to disappear without a trace.

A worthwhile read on the subject: Karl Marx on the effects of technological improvements You might not agree with it, or you might shy away from it solely because of who wrote it, but it was a serious economics argument explaining what happens and why.

Employers want to make as much money as possible without having to pay people.

Its been said before:

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a theory put forward by Marx to the effect that the rate of profit enjoyed by capitalists will get smaller and smaller over time. This is because capitalists use more and more developed materials and machinery in their production as the labour process becomes more and more socialised over time, and use smaller and smaller amounts of wage-labour per unit output.

personally I think Marx's criticism of capitalism is pretty accurate. Its only where he assumes that uprising and revolution will lead to some utopian ideal that he goes wrong.

===
Do you think that all business managers are heartless. Even they too may be "combined". And the company has to turn a profit, or close its doors.
So, when your competition is offering equal engineering skills, and the same or better quality of product, the company has no choice. Manufacture offshore, or squeeze salaries. That means, basically, hire someone who has done the work before. Save training costs, and be first to market, if you can,

Employers want to make as much money as possible without having to pay people.

Its been said before:

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a theory put forward by Marx to the effect that the rate of profit enjoyed by capitalists will get smaller and smaller over time. This is because capitalists use more and more developed materials and machinery in their production as the labour process becomes more and more socialised over time, and use smaller and smaller amounts of wage-labour per unit output.

personally I think Marx's criticism of capitalism is pretty accurate. Its only where he assumes that uprising and revolution will lead to some utopian ideal that he goes wrong.

But society has beat it into all of your heads that it's evil and wrong, which in the way the Soviet Union had implemented it -- It is.

No, it's wrong in the way Marx himself envisioned it. I've read a bit of his work. He openly stated that his Communism would only work if it was implemented across the entire world, and only by force. That's right: he both knew and embraced the fact that the Communist Revolution would be violent. This is why all the serious attempts at his vision have, in fact, been violent: it's an inherent part of the system. Not only that, but since it has to operate world-wide, it must spread itself, again by force if necessary. That is why the US was so scared of Communism: because Communism, as Marx envisioned it, cannot survive unless it destroys its enemies. It's also why the USSR, and other Communist nations, have sought to conquer or convert others. It's inherent in the system. Marxist Communism sought to destroy all other forms of government and social order.

And if you don't believe me, let me quote the Communist Manifesto:

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Any system of government that seeks to force itself upon the world, whether other countries want it or not, is evil and wrong.

Unfortunately they focus mainly on religious and ethnic hatred, which doesn't really account for some of the biggest genocides of the 20th century like in Pol Pot's Cambodia, Stalin's USSR and Mao's China, They do mention Pol Pot a couple of times, for the "blue ribbon" symbolism and the "Denial" stage, but miss the root of the problem. Their view is shallow at best, IMO.

But is there anything wrong with the overall categorization? I think a better example would be the conquests of the Mongols (and similar brutal wars, during the fall of the Western Roman Empire). They had many of the characteristics like dehumanization, but they didn't bother with symobolization,or organization. In situations where it was ordered, the Horde moved in and just killed everyone. No need to make plans for genocide when you have an extremely competent and obedient army ready to carry out your every whim efficiently. I doubt that the Mongols bothered to polarize their forces before most such massacres.

Most significantly, there was never any attempt to hide such atrocities. Widespread knowledge of previous atrocities made future battles and conquests easier.

"Genocide Watch" would have probably missed those "early stages" of Communism...

Let's take a look. Classification and symbolism is pretty obvious. They classified a lot of people in classes that were good (eg, revolutionaries, proletariat, heroes of the people, etc) and bad (kulaks, capitalists, class enemy, enemy of the people, etc).

Some categories were vague such as "kulak" which apparently degenerated in the late 30s into whoever could be accused (apparently, the secret police had quotas and not enough kulaks around to meet said quotas).

Dehumanization happened as well. For example, here's a quote from Lenin in a speech written some point in 1918 and published in 1925:

...while barely two million consist of kulaks, rich peasants, grain profiteers. These bloodsuckers have grown rich on the want suffered by the people in the war; they have raked in thousands and hundreds of thousands of rubles by pushing up the price of grain and other products. These spiders have grown fat at the expense of the peasants ruined by the war, at the expense of the starving workers. These leeches have sucked the blood of the working people and grown richer as the workers in the cities and factories starved. These vampires have been gathering the landed estates into their hands; they continue to enslave the poor peasants.

Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them! Hatred and contempt for the parties which defend them-the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and today's Left Socialist-Revolutionaries! The workers must crush the revolts of the kulaks with an iron hand, the kulaks who are forming an alliance with the foreign capitalists against the working people of their own country.

The kulaks take advantage of the ignorance, the disunity and isolation of the poor peasants. They incite them against the workers. Sometimes they bribe them while permitting them to "make a bit", a hundred rubles or so, by profiteering in grain (at the same time robbing the poor peasants of many thousands of rubles). The kulaks try to win the support of the middle peasants, and they sometimes succeed.

Note the use of dehumanizing terms like "bloodsucker", "spider", "leech", and "vampire". Then a call for their deaths in the middle paragraph. There are other timeslike when during a revolt Lenin ordered the hanging of a hundred kulaks to make examples of them.

There would have been about 15 years of genocide precursors (and ruthless massacres and imprisonments) prior to the Ukrainian Homodor (in which several million Ukrainians died).

Fanboi here. That's a passage from his younger diaries, when he had barely had contact with blacks and was certainly not politically defined as he would become later. He wrote that when he was about 24. Later, he wrote the following:

Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men — how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?

It might be noted he later actually fought and bled in Congo fighting against Mobutu along Congolese revolutionaries.

That's not to say everything he did was right. He was a proponent of death penalty, something a man of his education (he was a doctor) should have abhorred already in the 60s. He heavily miscalculated the campaigns in Congo and Bolivia. But racist? No way.

I don't think that "we" are apathetic half as much as that the vast majority of the population feels powerless to make any significant change and no longer truly dares hope that we ever will. That's why the most that happens now is that once in a while, a small percentage of the population becomes angry/frustrated enough at the situation to protest physically for a while, like the protests against invading Iraq almost a decade ago.

Once in a *long* while, part of the population starts to manage a bit more in terms of action because many of them are young and their frustration is joined with the sense that they have little to lose. When they start to show signs of having a real effect, those with political power use our media to spread propaganda (typically by claiming those involved have whatever moral failings are most hated at the time), shows of force by the police/military, and threatened or actual punishment through the legal system. Even when the government has made some degree of change, it has been done in a way that made it look like concern or benevolence from the politicians rather than any effect citizens had. The message to citizens is the same as it has been for millennia: be obedient to your masters without substantial protest, or face harsh punishment from them and be reviled by all.

In addition to the resulting sense of powerlessness & hopelessness is that most people are being too taxed by mental & physical stress to spare the intellectual or emotional resources needed to look beyond survival and momentary distractions from how stressed they are. Everyone has heard of "bread and circuses" by now, but we rarely think about what it truly meant, beyond that their government was giving them just enough to avoid rioting... It meant that those citizens had only what was needed for most to survive physically & psychologically, enough to view & treat one another as rivals, but not what's needed feel energetic (well-rested, well-fed, confident) enough to band together and truly challenge the folks in charge.

You can see everything I described above -- people in bread & circus survival mode protesting with barely a glimmer of hope that it will work, then their own mental/physical state plus the powers in charge slowly tearing the movement apart in last December's "Eulogy for Occupy". Americans that feel that our fellow citizens are truly just apathetic should read it.

In stark comparison, you can also see a stirring example of what rebelling citizens sound like when they've been faring well enough to work together against their government in this letter written by Canadian revolutionary leader Chevalier de Lorimier shortly before his execution. Things written during other uprisings or times of conflict decades later where the citizens ultimately succeeded (e.g. UK & US women's suffrage, the US Civil Rights Era, anti-Vietnam protests) show a similar tone of determined optimism that tends to be conspicuously absent in cases more like OWS.

A way to rephrase what you wrote in the proper jargon is:

Anonymous aren't revolutionary. They're adventurists.

Same as it ever was when middle class kids decide to take on 'The Man.'

Class Warfare: The Mortal Enemy Of Economic Growth And Jobs
The Communist Manifesto

No, he doesn't claim that communism changes people in such way.

I'm hardly well read in the works of Marx, so I would be doing him a disservice by pretending to explain his position. I advise you to read Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property.

A communist economy is by definition managed by the state.

False. A communist economy is by definition one in which there is no state. That's how Marx and Engels defined it.

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.
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

You may not like this idea. You may not believe it is possible. But it is the definition of communism.

Marxists.org puts a copyleft notice on 'The communist manifesto'. Even that is kind of ridiculous, since it was published in 1848 (yes, including the English translation), and even Disney wouldn't claim it was still in copyright.

Or perhaps it means today's socialists are as busy re-writing history as the Nazi movement was.

Exactly what are you inferring here? That the Nazis were socialists and modern socialists have covered that up somehow, or that socialism itself has changed from a Nazi-esque system to the current one?

If it's the first, than congratuations, you're as nutty as moon landing deniers.

If it's the second, then you're just wrong, and that can be backed up by historical first hand sources. Socialism has changed, but it was never like the Nazi system.

Want to see what old time socialism was about? Read Edward Bellamy's book Looking Backward. It's fairly short and public domain. And of course you can look up the Communist Manifesto, although be warned that while those on the right tend to describe all socialism as communism (communism is just one type of socialism). Want to learn about modern socialism? Examine the way Scandinavia does it, since they're usually used as the best example. Want something a bit more extreme? Look at China, with their market communism, or Cuba.

Or, you can always just believe what all the Neo-McCarthyists tell you (socialists eat your babies!) and live in ignorance. Your choice.

I don't see mention of violence or violent revolutions with Kibbutzim so no surprise if the end result is different. In contrast the popular official communism document mentions it: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm

When you have a violent revolution don't be surprised if you get a dictatorship.

With the American Revolution it was more of the American ruling class overthrowing the British - closer to a war of independence than one of those semi-chaotic "winner takes all" revolutions.

The French Revolution did actually end up with something like a dictatorship at some points, and some parts were pretty bad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution#Reign_of_Terror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

Well it's built into the system - Marx believed in a Dictatorship of the Proletariat where following a revolution the bourgeoisie would be disenfranchised politically and their property confiscated. Once you start talking about disenfranchising classes and seizing their property you've basically left the concept of democracy behind.

Now it's worth pointing out that the Social Democrats disagreed with this. They were reformists par excellence and aimed to gain power democratically. Marx criticized them in "Critique of the Gotha program", which is where the phrase dictatorship of the proletariat originates.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm

Now if you fast forward to to present day you find three types of society

1) Capitalist

2) Social Democratic

3) Communist

You actually find that a move from capitalism to social democracy means more rights for workers - the right to strike for example or form a union. A move from capitalism to communism means less rights. In the USSR and China workers on collective farms didn't even have the capitalist right to change jobs. Agriculture collapsed and millions starved to death.

It is also worth pointing out that China is probably more capitalist now than the US, even though the Party maintains a monopoly on power and can still censor the news and overrule the courts.

So Communism meant serfdom and hunger followed by authoritarian capitalism where the Party still operates above the law and where Party insiders end up owning the nominally privatised factories - China or Vietnam. Or maybe the system will stay feudal - e.g. North Korea.

It's fair to assume that neither possibility is a particularly welcome outcome for the Proletarian class Communism is supposed to be helping.

I.e. they'd be far better off as a proletarian voting for a Gotha like Social Democratic reformist program. That's what happened in Germany or Sweden and both manages to combine lots of rights for workers with a an economy which is probably almost as efficient as the more capitalist US.

I.e Marx was wrong and the reformists were right.

We need socialism! Forward on the road of Lenin and Trotsky!

READ MARX!

http://www.marxists.org/

Greting Slashdort! I greet you with the message that Del's is the best compotor and bolony is the greatest meat product and Vietnam is the greatest country! VIVA!

V.I.Lenin (a Communist leader in Soviet Russia) in his only phylosophic work "MATERIALISM and EMPIRIO-CRITICISM" said:

The electron is as inexhaustible as the atom, nature is infinite, but it infinitely exists.

This news proves his views...

First they pass laws to ensure equality among persons given the effort.

Next they pass laws to ensure equality among persons regardless of the effort.

Next they MANDATE that all people are equal in all aspects regardless of education or effort

Finally, they mandate what activities, and what you must do to entertain yourself. After all, it's all in the name of equality. Everybody else has access to this, and watches it, so you must also be reduced to those sole choices. Socialism: Sharing misery equally since 1948>/a>

First they pass laws to ensure equality among persons given the effort. Next they pass laws to ensure equality among persons regardless of the effort. Next they MANDATE that all people are equal in all aspects regardless of education or effort Finally, they mandate what activities, and what you must do to entertain yourself. After all, it's all in the name of equality. Everybody else has access to this, and watches it, so you must also be reduced to those sole choices. Socialism: Sharing misery equally since 1948.

They were profiting off of the work of other people

Hm...profiting off the work of other people is a bad thing...I think I see where you are going with this:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm

And that plank would be

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

source

I suppose you're ready and willing to quibble over the meaning of "monopoly."

Let the liars and hypocrites, the dull-witted and blind, the bourgeois and their supporters hoodwink the people with talk about freedom in general, about equality in general, about democracy in general.

We say to the workers and peasants: Tear the masks from the faces of these liars, open the eyes of these blind ones. Ask them:

âoeEquality between what sex and what other sex?

âoeBetween what nation and what other nation?

âoeBetween what class and what other class?

âoeFreedom from what yoke, or from the yoke of what class? Freedom for what class?â

Whoever speaks of politics, of democracy, of liberty, of equality, of socialism, and does not at the same time ask these questions, does not put them in the foreground, does not fight against concealing, hushing up and glossing over these questions, is one of the worst enemies of the toilers, is a wolf in sheep's clothing, is a bitter opponent of the workers and peasants, is a servant of the landlords, tsars, capitalists.

--LENIN http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/nov/06.htm

Actually Lenin developed the teaching in 1916. I hate to admit he was right.

I didn't say it had anything to do with the Communist manifesto, I said (and I quote):

And now, the people are occupying Wall Street with demands that give the Communist Manifesto itself run for its money

.

It gives Communist Manifesto RUN FOR ITS MONEY.

Here is Communist Manifesto in simple point form:

1. Abolition of private property and the 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.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communications and transportation 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 labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.

Here are some of the OWS demands that I gave a point by point analysis in a link in my first comment:

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. ....... raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Demand four: Free college education.

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.

-----

I thus contend that Communist Manifesto is NOTHING compared to the list of demands from the OWS movement based on just the points about guaranteed minimum income, guaranteed health care and overall debt forgiveness ALONE, never mind the rest of that drivel.

My point stands, you have no right to call my statements ignorant as you have no idea what you are talking about.

I'd go back a few years further to LBJ removing silver from American coinage, a key event in the ongoing destruction of the dollar. The 1965 minimum wage paid in 1965 90% silver dollar coins would be worth around $30/hour in today's fiat money. FDR confiscating gold and devaluing the dollar was bad but not catastrophic. Woodrow Wilson's creation of the Federal Reserve enabled the later mischief. The rot had set in when Nixon officially took us off the gold standard and engaged in assorted other economic stupidity. Of all these events, LBJ's economic manipulation to cover the expense of his welfare/warfare state was the worst in my opinion.

Throw in the dividend double-tax that discourages dividend payments that help keep public companies honest (accountants can fake many things but not cash payments), the massive leverage generated by Wall Street banks (derivatives, options, CDOs, etc) that enables all sorts of heads-we-win/tails-you-lose mischief, the federal government encouraging real estate asset bubbles (Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, mortgage interest deduction, CRA, etc), and you come to realize that this hasn't been a capitalist nation in a very long time.

Austrian school economists have been warning the world of the dangers of the Keynesian economics practiced by "mainstream" economists for generations now. It looks like we're heading for the "crack-up boom" they predicted, with the Obama Administration accelerating the end-game dramatically. What's fascinating is that Marx understood the danger of undermining currencies as well.

Anyhow, if you want to steal wealth from the average family there's no surer way than printing lots of new currency, which dilutes the value of existing currency, and handing that new currency to your buddies on Wall Street (Goldman Sachs/etc) and politically connected corporate socialists. Talk of manipulating the income tax is laughable misdirection in comparison to this.

this.
Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major – perhaps the major – stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor. A new field is opened for industrial and commercial strategies on the one hand, and political and military strategies on the other. --Lyotard, the Postmodern Condition, 1979

"the positives of actual Marxist ideals"? What, like jailing anyone who doesn't agree with Marxist thought?

In fact, Marx had pretty strong feelings in favor of freedom of press and speech. See
this, for instance.

Smash imperialism through international socialist revolution!

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/index.htm

That's the conventional account of why independent third parties are a bad idea. There are several shortcomings with that account, however.

First, while elections are important, they aren't the beginning or ending of politics -- not even in the conventional civics class account of US politics. Politicians don't simply enact the policies they campaigned upon. Federal affirmative action policies were implemented, and a national minimum income policy was proposed, by the Nixon administration. Nixon was a racist bigot and a fiscally conservative anti-Communist. However, his administration was during a seismic shift to the left among people in the US, and the legitimacy of the federal government was under attack; thus, a conservative Republican put forth policies to the left of anything we've seen from the Democrats elected since.

Second, there's more to an election than who wins. It's been speculated that Ross Perot's candidacy was successful enough that the Republican Party had to adapt its platform to attract Perot supporters. Contrast that with the 2004 election, in which many anti-war activists supported John Kerry, the Democrat who loudly proclaimed his status as a Vietnam veteran and who campaigned to escalate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As a thought experiment, imagine what would happen if in a presidential election, the Republican candidate got 40% of the popular vote, the Democrat 35%, and the Green 25%. By the rules, the Republican would win the White House. However, the Democrats would know they lost, and the Republicans would know they won, because there'd been a large turnout for a left wing candidate. Under those circumstances, wouldn't the Democrats see a need to move left in order to reclaim support? Would the Republicans be confident in charging ahead with conservative policies, knowing that 60% of the electorate openly opposes them?

To be clear, I'm not afraid of a Republican being elected president, if the Republican president is weak and intimidated by the left.

Finally, there's this essay, by the Marxist Hal Draper, Who’s going to be the lesser-evil in 1968?. The key point of that essay:

So who was really the Lesser Evil in 1964? The point is that it is the question which is a disaster, not the answer. In setups where the choice is between one capitalist politician and another, the defeat comes in accepting the limitation to this choice.