White Supremecists Slay 49 in NZ Mosques

[Dill]

(03-18-2019, 08:47 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: But communism as defined by Marx is the ideological communism. You're talking about people defending communism as an ideology, but to defend the ideology is to defend Marxist communism, not Stalinism, Maoism, or any of the perverted less-than-half-assed attempts at communist governments. Ideological communism isn't workable, especially on a nation-state scale. Pure democracy also isn't, nor anarchy, nor capitalism, nor many other ideologies. However, critiques of those ideologies should be based on the ideologies themselves, not the corrupted versions of them people throw together.

I make derogatory comments about capitalism all of the time, but I know at its core capitalism is about the fair distribution of resources based on a free-market economy. It isn't the corrupted neo-liberal shit show that is currently screwing over the working people in this country and many others. If we are ever going to improve our societies, we must understand what the ideologies really are and where we have strayed from them. We must look at where others have gone wrong in applying these ideological viewpoints so we can continue to improve our current society. When we push false narratives about what an ideology is or isn't it harms the efforts towards progress.

I don't think Marx ever took time to describe what a state should look like, since his ultimate goal was a rather libertarian/anarchist disappearance of the state altogether. The only (quasi) state form he praised (that I can think of) was the short-lived Paris Commune. That was in his Critique of the Gotha Program, the German Social Democrats "reformist" platform in 1875.

What people currently criticize as communism is usually a Marxist-leninist or Stalinist state, with its one-party rule and bureaucratized control of the economy.