White Supremecists Slay 49 in NZ Mosques

[Dill]

(03-19-2019, 08:25 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: I'm aware, but that's still ideological communism. Both capitalism and communism, ideologically speaking, rely on little to no state. They rely on power solely in the hands of the people. I know most people are usually criticizing corrupted, applied attempts at communism when they are criticizing communism, but that is not the ideal version of communism. It's not the ideology.

I wasn't correcting you Bels, just tossing ins some additional info about Marx and the state.

People largely identify communism with marxism-leninism and the Stalinist state form.  Few actually read Marx anymore, and fewer still read Lenin or Stalin--at least in the US.

Would be more accurate to say something like "wherever the Stalinist state-form has been imposed" or some such, when talking about what people usually call Communism. Viewed through the prism of anti-communism, numerous different "communisms" are melded into one under one label. That was one of the great deficiencies of US foreign policy during the Cold War.

Also, "Marxism" as philosophy and social scientific practice has a much broader legacy than Stalinism as a form of political organization, and in Western Europe a rather positive one. Marx's description of capitalism as a mode of production still seems valid and useful for explaining current trends in globalization.

PS In post #94when you use the term "classical Marxism" I assume you are refering to what is sometimes called "orthodox Marxism" or "marxism-Lenism." From 1848 on, Marx himself thought that the proletariat could acquire state power through the vote as well as through revolution, despite his later critiques of reformism. The idea of a vanguard party which seizes power and maintains a functioning core of the bourgeois state to bridge the gap between socialism and communism--that's all Lenin.