Harry’s Place

And the black book of capitalism puts the capitalist deathtoll at 100 million, it seems neocons are pretty extravagant with their numbers, while the left is always scientific.

That said I would lump the KR to the US camp, we have seen this already, there were two sides:

Soviet side, allied to Vietnam

US side, allied to China and KR

And the black book of capitalism puts the capitalist deathtoll at 100 million

I await the source to this claim with interest

There ya go

http://www.prs12.com/article.php3?id_article=5242

Also it is outdated, ten years later 6 million children die of starvation worldwide every year.

http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-basics/hunger-facts-international.html

meaning just children alone ups the total to 160 million victims of capitalism.

Have you considered, Mikey, that not even the Marxist-Leninists consider Pol Pot to have been an exemplary Marxist-Leninist?

It is good to know that a site - Harry’s Place - which reportedly emerged from an erstwhile strongly pro-”Communist” milieu has finally recognised the many crimes of Stalinism. But your list of victims above should include the tens of thousands of Bolshevik revolutionaries who made the Russian revolution and were murdered by the Stalinist regimes.
Now let us have an estimate for the deathtoll for which western capitalism (US, UK, Israel etc) are responsible.

Excellent post. Can we also now have a similar posting for the victims of Theism as well now?

Have you considered, Mikey, that not even the Marxist-Leninists consider Pol Pot to have been an exemplary Marxist-Leninist?

Oh for fuck’s sake, let’s not start with that SPGB stuff again….

P.S. Fwanker, please cross-reference those statistics with the economical and political systems used in said countries. I think you’ll find you’re just fucked over your own argument completely.

Sorry Flanker, I can’t read French so the first article is aloof to me. However, the second article is about global hunger and doesn’t attribute them to economic systems.

“One would hope that today people can spare a thought for the victims of this ideology and to ensure that these crimes are known about and taught in schools.”

A good start would be a memorial to all the victims in major cities of the world.

Great post about a dreadful regime. What is the betting that a Cuba groupie is tempted to retort?

What Mikey doesn’t mention is that the Khmer Rouge were overthrown by Marxist-Leninists from Vietnam, and then subsequently supported by the US with cash and diplomatic support all the way through the 1980s.

Flanker’s article includes all of the deaths in World War 2 as part of the “capitalist deathtoll”. He’s even stupider and/or more dishonest than I thought.

Courtois’ numbers and intepretation have been doubted, and I say this as no fan of Marxist-Leninist/Bolshevik Communism. Lenin’s particular brand of Vulgar Marxism and Necheavean terror fetish alone did not cause all 100 million deaths. Of course it provided the ‘meta’ social frame work for many, but civil war, pre-existing ethnic tensions, mismanagement, wilful and otherwise and human rather than red indifference play their bloody part. One might, and i wouldn’t, use the same logic to say Liberalism was directly responsible for the famines of Ireland and Bengal. It can lead to a steely determination of ideology as fruitless as that of economic base

One thing worth considering is that today 30 years ago, the Cambodian people ’swapped’ a government set on auto-genocide for a very brutal foreign regime. Moving from the seventh to the first circle. It ain’t anybody’s cause to celebrate but to mourn

We learn from another thread that Mads Gilbert, the Norwegian doctor whose eyewitness accounts of the suffering in the Gaza Strip are accepted at face value by otherwise reputable newspapers, used to be a propagandist/apologist for the Khmer Rouge.

Mikey, you do miss out the rather important point that it was communist Vietnam which invaded in 1978/9 and ended the genocide in Cambodia whilst America continued to support the opposition which included the Khmer Rouge until 1990, even making the UN recognise the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate representative of Cambodia as late as 1990.
Sorry, it’s not as simple as red=bad.

The total approaches 100 million people killed

Then, not far off from the number of civilans that the Guardian, the BBC and the BMJ claimed are killed by the US in Iraq and Afganistan every month.

communist Vietnam which invaded in 1978/9 and ended the genocide in Cambodia

Invading to overthrow a dictatorship?

So Communist Vietnam was a very early member of the “decent Left”. Interesting. Presumably the anti-imperialist contingent in these parts protested Vietnam’s actions?

Hmm?

“However, the second article is about global hunger and doesn’t attribute them to economic systems.”

Well only 3 countries in the whole world are not capitalist, meaning that 60 million killed by that economic system that rewards the rich and punishes the poor with death. And mind you they are only children we are tallying.

“P.S. Fwanker, please cross-reference those statistics with the economical and political systems used in said countries. I think you’ll find you’re just fucked over your own argument completely.”

Nope those were capitalist countries/sides

“Flanker’s article includes all of the deaths in World War 2 as part of the “capitalist deathtoll”. He’s even stupider and/or more dishonest than I thought.”

Nazi Germany started WWII.

Any deathtoll y

any deathtoll you can come up with and Capitalism still wins in the killcount.

“So Communist Vietnam was a very early member of the “decent Left”. Interesting. Presumably the anti-imperialist contingent in these parts protested Vietnam’s actions?”

No, Vietnam was defending itself from a Cambodian invasion, the left never opposes self-defense, just wars of aggression.

socialrepublican is correct - some of the numbers given are wild over-estimates. For example, the number for China is over-estimated by at least a factor of 2. Further, while the Maoists did murder freely, the deliberate ideological murders should not be classed with the economic incompetence of the Great Leap Forward. Capitalism, too, has had millions of deaths due to economic incompetence.

The Khmer regime was so psychotically disturbed as to place it outside all normal political definitions, but it seems fair to say it was closer in many ways to Fascism than to Stalinist Communism. Veneration of the rural above the urban, agrarianism, blood and soil, idealisation of the past rather than the future, not even the worst of the other Communist regimes did these things. Stalin and Mao were the worst Communist leaders, Pol Pot was a nut-ball off the scale.

“For those not killed in a violent way, malaria, typhoid, dysentery and cholera were responsible for numerous more deaths as was starvation.”

Thank goodness people don’t die of such diseases in places like Haiti, the Congo, Guatemala, the Philippines and other such countries blessed to live under capitalism.

I’m not certain on this, but I believe some of the contributors to the BBOC have criticised Courtois’ figures, saying he had such an obsession with reaching 100 million that he began to play a little fast and loose with the facts.

Thanks for your comment! It has been placed in the moderation queue, and if it is approved it will be published here soon!

Hahahahahaha

Mikey forgets that the Vietnamese revolutionaries who overthrew Pol Pot were also communists, and also called themselves marxist-leninists.

Was the Vietnamese intervention against a clearly genocidal regime welcomed by those staunch anti-communists in the White House?

Not at all! China and the United States allied to block access of the new Cambodian government to the Cambodian seat at the United Nations. The US suceeded in ensuring that the defeated Pol Pot regime continued representing Cambodia at the UN for another decade and a half.

“Democratic Kampuchea”, as the Pol Pot regime called itself, was not a state in any meaningful sense. It controlled little territory, and had been repudiated by the mass of the Cambodia people. But for 15 years after its defeat it held on to the Cambodian UN seat - with the full support of the United States, China and most of ASEAN.

Fifteen years! It’s a shame that Mikey has fiorgotten this disgusting collaboration betweem Reagan (and Bush the father) with Pol Pot. A collaboration which was to allow Pol Pot himself to evade justice and die in his sleep.

At the time Deng Xiaoping was running China, and he was precisely the kind of communist with whom the west could do business. And if that meant going along with Deng’s genocidal Cambodia sidekicks, too bad, Just a bit more collateral damage in the Cold War.

“I do not understand why some people want to remove Pol Pot,” said Deng in 1984. “It is true that he made some mistakes in the past but now he is leading the fight against the Vietnamese aggressors.” And these sentiments were apparently shared by the Reagan White House.

Reagans’s Secretary of State, George Schultz, was quite open about opposing any attempts to indict Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide. Under the first Bush, Secretary of state James Baker pushed for the Khmer Rouge to be included in a future Cambodian government.

Only in 1994 (under Clinton) did the US line change, and it became Washington policy to bring the perpetrators of genocide to justice.

So who has a more honourable record on Kampuchea - the Vietnamese and Soviet communists, or the American anti-communists?

Mikey reveals a crass ignorance of indochinese history, and is merely using the Cambodian genocide as a peg from which to hang his anti-communism.

Nobody of sane mind should ever again be proud to refer to themselves as a Marxist-Leninist.

Nobody of sane mind ever was. Just commies.

“Flanker’s article includes all of the deaths in World War 2 as part of the “capitalist deathtoll”. He’s even stupider and/or more dishonest than I thought.”

Well, strictly speaking, fascism is one of the political forms amenable to capitalist survival in times of extreme systemic crisis.

who has a more honourable record on Kampuchea - the Vietnamese and Soviet communists, or the American anti-communists?

Hilarious. Perhaps if the Marxist-Leninists and their fellow travellers in the West hadn’t done all they could to undermine and defeat the American-led defence of freedom and war on Communism in South-East Asia, there wouldn’t have been a Communist Vietnam or Communist Cambodia in the first place.

Well, strictly speaking, fascism is one of the political forms amenable to capitalist survival in times of extreme systemic crisis.

Well, strictly speaking, that theory is utter nonsense only believed by Trots and other Commies.

‘fascism is one of the political forms amenable to capitalist survival in times of extreme systemic crisis’ - not really. Hitler didn’t want the Danzig Corridor to defend Volkwagon share prices or the ownership of IG Farben. Indeed, whom might have threatened them. Definately not the German working class after 1934 nor really the Soviet Union. Base, surprise, surprise, did not cause the Second World War

We should also recall that the American bombing campaign in Cambodia was a major aid for the Khmer Rouges recruitment. Foreign adventures never have unexpected consequences, do they?

Communism is a failed ideology, but most of the massacres are due to them being authortarian dictatorships and power from the barrel of a gun. Being anti-red didn’t make Franco or Pinochet any nicer, and somehow I don’t think the communists running Cyprus are going to massacre anyone.

The Communist Manifesto says nothing about killing and I am damned sure Karl Marx never had Cambodia in mind. I totally agree with Tinter.

Didn’t Dosteyefsky predict that communism would take 100,000,000 lives?

Doktor Wer: “defence of freedom”

You are actually going to defend South Vietnam as anything other than a dictatorship at least as odious as its northern counterpart? That actually started the war by cancelling the nationwide democratic elections the communists were prepared to participate in?

Well, strictly speaking, that theory is utter nonsense only believed by Trots and other Commies.

And social scientists, since private property and commodity production as the dominant forms of surplus extraction did not disappear.

Its a bit sad how the Pilger’s con job on Cambodia is now the standard debating line from the left. Apparently the US put the Khmer Rouge in power now?

What a disgrace.

Doktor Wer.
Hilarious. Perhaps if the Marxist-Leninists and their fellow travellers in the West hadn’t done all they could to undermine and defeat the American-led defence of freedom and war on Communism in South-East Asia, there wouldn’t have been a Communist Vietnam or Communist Cambodia in the first place.
How about we stick to events that actually happened rather than imagined ones? For a long time America backed a truly evil group of people whilst Communists actually brought a genocide to an end (irrespective of their motives for involvement - mainly to do with Khmer Rouge mounting raids in the Mekong delta area).

My point is, 30 years since the end of the Khmer Rouge has not been getting nearly enough coverage and I was glad to see HP bucking the trend, then I read

Nobody of sane mind should ever again be proud to refer to themselves as a Marxist-Leninist.

It is despicable for Mikey to use the deaths of millions of people to make a partisan point, especially when he seems to have so little concern for very important details of those tragic events.

Dave - If you can name a leading historian on fascism working today who relies on a base explanation alone, I own you one beer. Even Paxton acknowlegdes that cultural aspects were of greater importance to fascists than economics

Mesquito - he did also believe the Tsar was actually chosen by giant beardy Sky pixie too. Great writer tho

“Mesquito - he did also believe the Tsar was actually chosen by giant beardy Sky pixie too. Great writer tho”

Oh, I have no doubt that he was a strange, mystical creature. But rather visionary, in this respect.

You are actually going to defend South Vietnam as anything other than a dictatorship at least as odious as its northern counterpart?

I would. And I would add that South Korea and Taiwan were not especially nice countries even compared to North Korea and China, back in the 1950s. But run the comparison again today and you can see why communist dictatorships are worth fighting against.

That actually started the war by cancelling the nationwide democratic elections the communists were prepared to participate in?

This is the standard communist apologist line. Very little is published on what North Vietnam was like, but from what i have read the regime had completely wiped out all opposition. It was a totalitarian state, and a very effective one.

Do you really think an election could be held in North Korea under Kim il Sung?

You are actually going to defend South Vietnam as anything other than a dictatorship at least as odious as its northern counterpart?

Northern Vietnam was a far worse dictatorship that claimed many, many more victims than the pro-Western regimes in the South.

And social scientists, since private property and commodity production as the dominant forms of surplus extraction did not disappear.

By all means point me to a credible social scientist who believes that fascism is just an “extreme” form of capitalism.

Your comment is typical of the idiocies that Marxists try to pass off as profound thoughts: let me point out to you that both the USA and Saudi Arabia have “commodity production as the dominant forms of surplus extraction”, but beyond that they could not be more different societies, so what relevance does your “materialist” claptrap have to understanding them?

Communism and Islam have this in common-that their apologists demand that they be judged in theory only, never by the actions of their adherents, no matter how loyal, well-versed or “respected”. Thus the smouldering rubble which invariably results from the attempted imposition of either may always be dismissed as operator error, and the theoretical perfection of both is preserved- at least in the minds of humanities-graduate fuckwits.

>> I’m not certain on this, but I believe some of the contributors to
>> the BBOC have criticised Courtois’ figures, saying he had such an
>> obsession with reaching 100 million that he began to play a little
>> fast and loose with the facts.

Yes that is correct, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin distanced themself from Courtois Preface for that reason.

And the black book of capitalism puts the capitalist deathtoll at 100 million, it seems neocons are pretty extravagant with their numbers, while the left is always scientific.

Spin on this, you piece of fascist effluent.

Is there a significance to the Doktor Wer handle?

I think the actual figure may be as low as 87 million.

Do you really think an election could be held in North Korea under Kim il Sung?

Elections are held there fairly frequently and appear to be very popular judging by the turnout rate. Everyone votes for the same person because everyone knows who the best person for the job is.

Have you considered, Mikey, that not even the Marxist-Leninists consider Pol Pot to have been an exemplary Marxist-Leninist?

DAVE

If they think the same about Lenin, we might be on to something.

You won’t find me offering a monocausal “base” explanation, SR, or denying the “relative autonomy” of political and cultural factors. But it’s impossible, for example, to envisage the rise of fascism separately from industrial society in the era of the nation state—ie two of the developments inextricably intertwined with the rise of capitalism as the dominant mode of production globally.

DW: it’s not an extreme form of capitalism, since capitalism is a way of organising economic production and fascism is a political ideology; but it is one of the political ideologies that evolves out of, and under certain conditions helps to stabilise, the economic structure associated with that form of production.

Hitler asked about the prosepect for American fascism. His reply that there were none, as Americans were not Germans.

Hitler WAS asked, I mean.

it is one of the political ideologies that evolves out of, and under certain conditions helps to stabilise, the economic structure associated with that form of production.

You keep asserting this, and I keep waiting for you to cite a credible social scientist who argues it.

(Saying that fascism “evolves out of” capitalism is as banal as saying that socialism “evolves out of” capitalism, or even that policing “evolves out of” law-breaking)

And we all know how Hitler was omniscient.

Ike warned about fascism in his farewell address, it seems not even a hawkish republican could stop the military industrial complex.

“Ike warned about fascism in his farewell address, it seems not even a hawkish republican could stop the military industrial complex.”

Ike didn’t say a word about fascism in his farewell address, goofball.

“You keep asserting this, and I keep waiting for you to cite a credible social scientist who argues it.”

Argumentum ad verecundiam

>>Everyone votes for the same person because everyone knows
>>who the best person for the job is.

I hope you meant that as a joke.

>>Northern Vietnam was a far worse dictatorship that claimed
>>many, many more victims than the pro-Western regimes in the South.

There is not much evidence of that, It is true that the North Viatnamese and the NLF did many very horrible things but the “anti-insurgeny” the South Vietnam governments perfomed (on US orders and with US material) was basicaly a genocide against its own population.

For a long time America backed a truly evil group of people whilst Communists actually brought a genocide to an end (irrespective of their motives for involvement - mainly to do with Khmer Rouge mounting raids in the Mekong delta area).

A totalitarian communist regime replaced a genocidal totalitarian communist regime neighbor with a non-genocidal totalitarian communist regime, and occupied the country for a decade.

It was China that was the KR’s main supporter and that was outraged to see them removed from power. It was so outraged that it invaded Vietnam as punishment, and it continued to support the KR once they were out of power. The US “support” for the KR was just diplomatic harassment of Vietnam, it had no material impact on anything.

The thing is John Pilger has made a major campaign out of getting people to believe the US was behind the Khmer Rouge. You won’t find him talking about the KR before 1979 much, and for good reason.

“The US “support” for the KR was just diplomatic harassment of Vietnam, it had no material impact on anything.”

So let me get this straight, the left “supports” the KR and that is worthy of a OP, however the KR using US weapons does not materially impact anything?

http://www.greenleft.org.au/1994/150/9363

It is not surprising the US supports genocidal regimes, they supported the Junta in Guatemala that exterminated Mayans.

the lengths the hard lefties will go to justify Communists crimes knows no bounds. Imagine equating deaths from drought and hunger (which when man made is caused by both sides of a conflict) with the very real purposeful murder of millions in Cambodia, the FORCED collectivization in Ukraine and Russia in the 30s, and establishment of gulags. You have to be a deranged fuckwad to even consider those comparisons, much less publicly make them. I don’t believe for a minute that even those making the claims actually believe them. Comparing, say, U.S. actions to those of Stalin, or Pol Pot? come on.

The best way to look at a system of govt is to see how it treats its own people. China, the Soviet Union, Kampuchea under Pol Pot, North Korea, etc. treated (and still treat, where applicable) their own citizens like garbage or like rats to be exterminated. Is this true of the U.S.? WEstern Europe? Australia, Israel?

The capitalist system has over the years been responsible for many human rights abuses, but to compare those to the crimes done in the name of socialism by mass murdering Communist regimes does a disservice to and cheapens what happened to the victims of those regimes. And of course, the citizens of Communist countries continue to show us their views on this matter by voting with their feet and risking their lives to come to the West. Only deranged fuckwads with their ideological heads stuck up their intellectually stagnant asses fail to recognize that.

‘it is one of the political ideologies that evolves out of, and under certain conditions helps to stabilise, the economic structure associated with that form of production’

Sorry, Dave, that was fairly banal. Fascism without elements of a crisis of modernity, such as urbanisation, industrialisation, mass participation in politics and most importantly the primacy of national identity is impossible. If you are trying to link fascism’s inherent violence to a capitalist society and thus due to Capitalism, you have to ask why did not Britain, the USA or any other classic ‘Capitalist’ nation did not start total wars and industrial genocide.

The fascist genus has many examples of movements that developed in various economic states. The Iron Guard for instance developed in a nation without a substantial industrial and capitalist base but with a highly developed nationalist tradition. Similarly the Ustasha and the Thunder Cross. Hungary still had near feudal economic rural conditions but still produced the Scythe Cross movement from its hinterland.

Base does have a part to play, but terms like base itself, super-structure, capitalist, production etc are abstractions of dynamic and multi-faceted phenomena. Is base purely ownership or the nature of production or the form of surplus or the division between agriculture and industrial? Just as i said of BBOC, attributing such vast suffering as the Nazi project of vernichtung or the gulags to just the idea or the economics is to blind yourself

“The best way to look at a system of govt is to see how it treats its own people.”

Just because Israel treats Israelis well, but treats Palestinians like animals, does not make them enlightened, it makes them racist, xenophobic, and pre-genocide nazis.

There is not much evidence of that

Actually, there’s plenty of evidence. For example, you didn’t see millions of ethnic Chinese fleeing the Republican of South Vietnam. You did see them flee after the Communist takeover.

“If you are trying to link fascism’s inherent violence to a capitalist society and thus due to Capitalism, you have to ask why did not Britain, the USA or any other classic ‘Capitalist’ nation did not start total wars and industrial genocide.”

Because the economy improved… FDR not only saved the US economy, but also saved the US from a fascist like govt erecting itself in the 1930’s. Fascism is born out of economic depression.

The business as to why the Khmer Rouge got the UN seat was that that there was a debate about abstaining or leaving the UN seat vacant but China wanted to recognise the KR and they could not leave the UN seat vacant. The US certainly did not want to recognise the quisling Vietnam regime that took power after the fall of the KR.

Flanker comments:

That said I would lump the KR to the US camp, we have seen this already, there were two sides:
Soviet side, allied to Vietnam
US side, allied to China and KR

The US were not allied to the Khmer Rouge. The US were backing Lon Nol who was fighting the Khmer Rouge and as such Flanker has it inverted.

vildechaye

One could make the point that the changes of land ownership in India, ideological driven by fine upstanding Liberals, resulted in millions of deaths, I would not. But as I said, to use Kershaw’s phase, human ‘indifference’ to suffering is a-particular of motive or ideology. Stalin wanted to collectivise primarily because that would guarentee the state the capital surplus to force industrialisation i.e. build his socialism. He was indifferent to the suffering not solely because of his particular beliefs but because he held those beliefs to be holy, sacred and historic. How dare anyone stand in the way of heaven on earth etc?

It is the certaincy, a primordial and universal tendancy, that kills and maims and rapes

Mr Danger: “I would. And I would add that South Korea and Taiwan were not especially nice countries even compared to North Korea and China, back in the 1950s. ”

Taiwan was most definetly better than China and North Korea throughout the nationalist period. So was South Korea. Neither murdered anything like the same amounts. The South Vietnamiese were just as enthusiastic on purges, killing tens of thousands rights away and then targetting religous minorities. The regime was murdering away, theres no defense to be made.

Indeed, most sources I have seen quote the communists as murdering far fewer. Which is bad certainly, but better than the south; and furthermore I’m not justifiying a war to defend them.

I think the South Vietnamise made equal or greater efforts to wipe out opposition. I can’t say if the election would have been free and fair; however, had the communists won it would have given them an incentive to conduct things in a more open manner. Forcing a war means you are certain to have a government whos power is based on force; elections would have given a chance of something better.

It certainly would have been better than a war in which 1.5 million died, in defense of a regime happy to murder people.

“The US “support” for the KR was just diplomatic harassment of Vietnam, it had no material impact on anything.”
So thats OK then!

Doktor Wer: “Northern Vietnam was a far worse dictatorship that claimed many, many more victims than the pro-Western regimes in the South.”

I’ve no love for either regime, but all the reading I have done has led me to believe the oppositte. The South tried to run a very tight and brutal ship.

They weren’t communists they were perfect libertarians. You survive by your utility. The apotheosis of Social Darwinism.

Herman asks:

And the black book of capitalism puts the capitalist deathtoll at 100 million
I await the source to this claim with interest.

I copied the passage that I used in my main post from the following reference:

Stéphane Courtois, “Introduction: the Crimes of Communism,” in Stéphane Courtois et al. eds, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999) p. 4

Dave comments:

Have you considered, Mikey, that not even the Marxist-Leninists consider Pol Pot to have been an exemplary Marxist-Leninist?

That may well be the case but then again all Communist parties seem to disagree with each other and refer to another Communists party politics as not properly Marxist-Leninist. We only have to look at the debate surrounding the Sino-Soviet split or the debate amongst Troytskyist groups as to whether the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ state of state capitalist. These differences of opinion went on and continue, but the fact is that they all consider themselves to be Marxist-Leninist.

>> Actually, there’s plenty of evidence. For example, you didn’t see
>> millions of ethnic Chinese fleeing the Republican of South
>> Vietnam. You did see them flee after the Communist takeover.

Thats a ridicolus comparsion, you are talking about things that happened after the fall of the south, you can’t possibly know what would have happened if the south had won the war (and neither can I).

John Palmer comments

your list of victims above should include the tens of thousands of Bolshevik revolutionaries who made the Russian revolution and were murdered by the Stalinist regimes.

It does.

As a command economy where all property belongs to the state and the state irself is the private property of a small self-selected gang, communism is always, though in mildly varying degrees, inherently totalitarian. Capitalism, on the other hand, can be authoritarian or democratic. Anyway, a market economy where power is not concentrated in the hands of the state is a pre-condition for democracy. There is not a single case of democratic (or, by the way, prosperous) communist countries or societies. All succesful societies are or have been capitalistic. Haiti and the like are not capitalistic: they’re just failed societies. Ethiopia was a failed society; then communism was imposed there and it became even more of a failed society. Most societies in the world (and all communist societies) are failed ones. Before Castro, Cuba (which right now is a real ghetto or, if you’d rather, Guantanamo without the three daily meals) was a dictatorship. With Castro it became a crueller and poorer dictatorship. Now, it is true the, during the Vietnam war, the US bombed parts of Cambodia. Can anybody guess why? Because of the Ho Chi Mihn trail. North Vietnam and the Vietcong forced Cambodia into the war. And let us not forget that what brought about the tragedy of Aghanistan was the Soviet invasion of the country. Finally, as Hannah Arendt proved quite well, left wing and right wing totalitarian regimes have much more in common with each other than any of them with real democracies.

Doktor Wer: “Actually, there’s plenty of evidence. For example, you didn’t see millions of ethnic Chinese fleeing the Republican of South Vietnam. You did see them flee after the Communist takeover.”

True, the Vietnam Communist did engage in a very wide range of repression after they won- they are a brutual dictatorship, and they used brutal methods. However, South Vietnam was just as happy to kill people while it was in power. Furthermore, I still think that had elections been held there was the possiblity of a less brutal government emerging.

Furthermore, the total number affected was not much more than the total number killed in the Vietnam War. In order to prevent it, i.e win, even more than that would have had to have died as the war was push all the way to North Vietnam. This does not seem to be desirable to me.

Thats a ridicolus comparsion

No, I am comparing how the population reacted to being ruled by the Southern junta, and the Northern Communists. They reacted to the latter by fleeing the country in colossal numbers. And Vietnamese resentment of their treatment under the Americans was so strong … that millions of them begged for the chance to live in the USA rather than under the Communists.

Mike S comments:

What Mikey doesn’t mention is that the Khmer Rouge were overthrown by Marxist-Leninists from Vietnam, and then subsequently supported by the US with cash and diplomatic support all the way through the 1980s.

This situation was rather complicated but it is explained very well in the following book which I would recommend to anyone:

Craig Etcheson, After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide (Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 2005)

I have explained the US support earlier but one must understand that the Khmer Rouge were not completely demolished in January 1979 and they continued to fight, especially from Thailand.

The pro-Vietnam regime that replaced the Khmer Rouge also carried out some horrific policies for example the detested K-5 project whereby Cambodians were forced to build fortifications along a 500 mile border between Cambodia and Thailand. This in itself was very dangerous with land mines and disease. Etcheson comments, “According to several estimates, 80 percent of those workers contracted malaria, and of those, up to 5 percent succumbed to the disease.” (Etchenson, After the Killing Fields, p. 25) He goes on to say that:

According to one official from the Ministry of Defense who defected to Thailand, official Cambodian government estimates concluded “in March 1986 that 30,000 people died since the beginning of the labor.”

He notes further that the final death toll and injuries from from land mines and other serious injuries were not known at the time he published his book (2005) and that scholars will have to wait for the archives to be open to tell. (Ibid. p. 27)

The conclusion of all this and as Etcheson highlights there were many in Cambodia who thought that the replacement regime was also guilty of crimes for which they should have been tried.

Joe Camel comments:

We learn from another thread that Mads Gilbert, the Norwegian doctor whose eyewitness accounts of the suffering in the Gaza Strip are accepted at face value by otherwise reputable newspapers, used to be a propagandist/apologist for the Khmer Rouge.

So was Noam Chomsky and various others including our very own (in Britain) Malcolm Caldwell.

as Hannah Arendt proved quite well, left wing and right wing totalitarian regimes have much more in common with each other than any of them with real democracies.

In fact, Nazism has much more in common with other mass movements, such as Islam, the Crusades, or the rise of Christianity, than it does with the pragmatic and individualised societies in the modern UK and USA.

So much for the guff about economics, or base and superstructure; the correct way to approach an understanding of social phenomena such as fascism is through a appreciation of their psychological appeal to their followers. Contrary to Marx, the same patterns emerge throughout history because of human nature and the power of ideas, rendering material conditions a distant second in importance.

Doktor Wer asks:

So Communist Vietnam was a very early member of the “decent Left”. Interesting. Presumably the anti-imperialist contingent in these parts protested Vietnam’s actions?

The answer is no. Please see my response to Mike S and more importantly Craig Etcheson’s book which I referred to.

Flanker comments:

any deathtoll you can come up with and Capitalism still wins in the killcount.

This is simply a disgraceful comment and shame on him for making such a statement.

I did read somewhere, that the Southern government was planning a grand settling of scores post-war ala Franco. I’ll try and dig it up

Doktor Wer: The point is we don’t know what the reaction would have been in North Vietnam to South Vietnamise occupation. That would be the valid comparision, especially considering the large movements of people both ways prior to the war.

I suspect that yes, not as many would have fled South Vietnamise government- North Vietnam economic policies resulted in a very wide ranging repression. However, I think the South Vietnamise government would actually have killed more people- this was their favoured method of action, and they had a record of extending it beyond just their immediate opponents (which both sides did) but also to ethnic, religious and other groups percived as a possible threat.

Its impossible to say, but given that very large numbers of boat people started to return in the 80’s/90’s I don’t think it would be worth killing millions over.

‘Contrary to Marx, the same patterns emerge throughout history because of human nature and the power of ideas, rendering material conditions a distant second in importance’

Hmmmm. That kind of feels like replacing the dialectic of materialism with one of ideas. Both are fairly vulgar reductions. Without the disruption and the crisis in material conditions aka wages, employment, housing, food supplies, Industrial/argicultural ratios, neither Bolshevik Communism nor Fascism would have much progress nor sense outside of the zealots. As Cobbett said, ‘I defy you to agitate a fellow with a full stomach’. Marx was far more circumspect about the relationship between the abstraction of base and superstructure (and recognised them as such) than many of his later followers such as Plekhanov. The truth lies in combination

That kind of feels like replacing the dialectic of materialism with one of ideas

That would be progress in the right direction.

Without the disruption and the crisis in material conditions aka wages, employment, housing, food supplies, Industrial/argicultural ratios, neither Bolshevik Communism nor Fascism would have much progress nor sense outside of the zealots.

That doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, SR. Long before any economic dislocation, you could discern the roots of Stalinism in Russian political culture (both Tsarism and the revolutionism of the 19th century). Similarly, you can trace the roots of Nazism in the German martial tradition and the well-noted German mania for organisation and collectivism.

As Cobbett said, ‘I defy you to agitate a fellow with a full stomach’.

Despite Cobbet, I defy you to agitate someone with an empty stomach. People preoccupied with the daily struggle for survival generally have no time or interest in revolt.

On the other hand, pampered elites whose biggest problem is boredom and distinguishing themselves from their peers are very easy to “agitate”. That’s why the ranks of the extreme Leftist parties are drawn from the universities and not from council estates.

Tinter comments:

You are actually going to defend South Vietnam as anything other than a dictatorship at least as odious as its northern counterpart? That actually started the war by cancelling the nationwide democratic elections the communists were prepared to participate in?

Certainly South Vietnam was a virtual dictatorship, but it certainly was not as bad as North Vietnam. One of the reasons for Diem not agreeing to the 1956 election was that whilst it was supposed to be a free election, there is no way that the election would have been free in the North. In that area there would in true Communist style been a 100% vote for Ho Chi Minh.

Senator J. F. Kennedy remarked in June 1956

the United States never give its approval to the early nationwide elections called for by the Geneva Agreement of 1954. Neither the United States nor Free Vietnam was a party to that agreement - and neither the United States nor Free Vietnam is ever going to be a party to an election obviously stacked and subverted in advance, urged upon us by those who have already broken their own pledges under the Agreement they now seek to enforce. [Emphasis added]

paul fauvet spends much time commenting about the situation after the fall of the Khmer Rouge and then comments:

Mikey reveals a crass ignorance of indochinese history, and is merely using the Cambodian genocide as a peg from which to hang his anti-communism.

Far from it. As I have stated in response to others, I am familiar with the situation post 1979 and it is contained in detail in Etcheson’s book on the matter After the Killing Fields to which I have referred. My own post was not about that period but about the period between 1975 and 1979.

Dan states:

The Communist Manifesto says nothing about killing and I am damned sure Karl Marx never had Cambodia in mind.

Karl Marx stated:

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.

Pol Pot’s turn came on April 17, 1975 and the terror which Karl Marx advocated started immediately.

“Certainly South Vietnam was a virtual dictatorship, but it certainly was not as bad as North Vietnam. One of the reasons for Diem not agreeing to the 1956 election was that whilst it was supposed to be a free election, there is no way that the election would have been free in the North. In that area there would in true Communist style been a 100% vote for Ho Chi Minh.”

It wasn’t a virtual dictatorship, it was a dictatorship. Diem had already fixed an election so he got 98%, including 130% in Saigon, so he gets no plaudits in that matter regardless. The US suggested he win it by a little less to be more belivable. Which makes:
neither the United States nor Free Vietnam is ever going to be a party to an election obviously stacked and subverted in advance
Quite amusing!

Giving up without trying wins no praise.

But Mikey, your response is completely inadequate.

I am familiar with the situation post 1979 and it is contained in detail in Etcheson’s book on the matter After the Killing Fields to which I have referred. My own post was not about that period but about the period between 1975 and 1979.

You are using the genocide of 2 million people as a stick with which to beat Marxist-Leninists. Certainly, the Vietnamese Communist regime was not made up of lovely people who removed the Khmer Rouge out of the goodness of their hearts, but remove them they did. Whereas America continued to support them for years.

Whilst the actions of the new regime were clearly foul, your attempt to show the new regime to be as bad as the Khmer Rouge just shows how much you want to attack Marxist-Leninists and how little you care about contemptible actions when they are committed by capitalists.

* “condoned by Capitalists” rather than committed would make more sense

Glakolite states:

The Khmer regime was so psychotically disturbed as to place it outside all normal political definitions, but it seems fair to say it was closer in many ways to Fascism than to Stalinist Communism. Veneration of the rural above the urban, agrarianism, blood and soil, idealisation of the past rather than the future, not even the worst of the other Communist regimes did these things. Stalin and Mao were the worst Communist leaders, Pol Pot was a nut-ball off the scale.

Many apologists for Communism who realise the crimes that Pol Pot committed would like to distance their ideology from Pol Pot, but Pol Pot’s ideology follows on and stems from Vietnamese Communism. This is well documented by Steve Heder in his excellent book, Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model: Volume 1. Imitation and Independence, 1930-1975. (Bangkok, Thailand: White Lotus Press, 2004)

As Heder shows, Pol Pot himself was influenced by Vietnamese Communists and indeed he wanted the Cambodians to be better Communists than the Vietnamese, indeed he wanted Cambodia to be the best Communist country in the world.

Moreover, the model for how fast Cambodia moved into Communism was Mao’s, Great Leap Forward. This is explained very well by Karl D. Jackson in his own edited book, Cambodia 1975-1978: Rendezvous with Death (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989) pp. 59-66. See also Kenneth M. Quinn’s explanation on page 219-231 of the same book.

It is not therefore possible to try and disassociate Pol Pot’s variety of Communism from earlier variants.

Gsirrah comments:

It is despicable for Mikey to use the deaths of millions of people to make a partisan point, especially when he seems to have so little concern for very important details of those tragic events.

My post was some 700 words. It was a simple blog post and I had no desire to write thousands of words detailing all the events of the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the aftermath. I focussed on the period that the Khmer Rouge was in power.

I am wondering what “very important details” Gsirrah believes I “have so little concern for”?

mesquito comments:

I think the actual figure [of communist deaths] may be as low as 87 million.

Oh, so that makes it ok then?

I remember in The Unbrearable Lightness Of Being when it was determined that the Khmer Rouge were no longer to be considered part of the Grand March Of Progress and were relegated into the black hole. Thankfully, that kind of messianic idiocy has largely left the Leftist project. Unhappily, it has been replaced by a frank willingness to make common cause with medievel theocrats.

‘you could discern the roots of Stalinism in Russian political culture (both Tsarism and the revolutionism of the 19th century)’

Linked very explicitly to a rapid state formation and the end of serfdom. Though the link between Stalinism and Tsarism is somewhat weak. Indeed recent research sees Nietszche as a major source of inspiration to Stalin’s own philosophical grounding, involving themes of cultural nihilsm reflecting Weberian ‘rationalisation’, liberalism and ‘iron cages’

‘you can trace the roots of Nazism in the German martial tradition and the well-noted German mania for organisation and collectivism’

Wow, the Sonderwag back again. Might you want to add the dehumanising effects of the Thirty Years War and Luther. No, that sjust easy grammer school shite. Indeed ‘organisation and collectivism’ are merely post-hoc constructs, not ideas nor causes. The Switz had a fine martial tradition and indeed a cultural mania for neatness cliche suggests, yet we hear very little of the thousand year Canton. The rise of the Nazis, a historical problem that has occupied some of the finest historical minds is not so simple.

‘That’s why the ranks of the extreme Leftist parties are drawn from the universities and not from council estates.’ - well it depends where and when, does it not? The KR, for instance was a mix of technocrats and peasant society. The Bolsheviks pre-1917 mostly took their numbers from minority groups, workers in heavy industry and peasant soldiers. If your talking western micro-sects such as the SWP, then yes. But i doubt they will shake the world, will they?

‘People preoccupied with the daily struggle for survival generally have no time or interest in revolt’

1789, 1793, 1848 for instance

Oh, so that makes it ok then?

Mesquito was being, as is his habit, facetious.

Mikey

you quote Marx after thousands had been killed in Germany and France, tens of thousand in Hungary, Austria and Italy by state authorities. You quote him as he has his paper closed down by the authorites after being aquitted by local juries of incitement. He writes as he awaits arrest, when hundreds faced draconian sentances in Prussian tribunals. This doesn’t make what he said right, merely remember the times

Bjorn comments:

It is true that the North Viatnamese and the NLF did many very horrible things ….

one can read for example about The Massacre of Hue

One can also read the detailed compendium of The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam.

As I believe I am only allowed 3 hyperlinks before this web site believes the post is spam, I will include two links here and the two remaining on my following post:

Pages 1-31
Pages 32-65

Pages 66-99
Pages 101-123

Remaining two links of The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam

Pages 66-99
Pages 101-123 Plus Index

20 million deaths in the USSR seems on the low side. Solzhenitsyn has quoted figures of 30 -60 million.

“it seems neocons are pretty extravagant with their numbers, while the left is always scientific.”

“La répression de la Révolution de 1905 en Russie : 100 000″

“Les répressions après le mouvement révolutionnaire dans les différents pays d’Europe, Finlande, Pays-Baltes, Hongrie, Allemagne, Pologne, Roumanie, Bulgarie (1918-1923) : 200 000″

“La répression colonialiste à Madagascar : 800 000″

“La Guerre en Algérie (1956-1962) : 1 200 000″

“Les massacres anti-communistes en Indonésie, après septembre 1965 : 1 500 000″

“La guerre du Golfe, victimes directes : 200 000″

Yeah……

The Black book of capitalism also blames the Russian, Finnish, Angolan and Mozambique civil wars, and the 1984 Ethiopian famine on “capitalism” when in fact these events were started or exacerbated by communist regimes.

The black book of capitalism also gives looser criteria for “victims of capitalism” than the black book of communism applies to victims of communism. Giving just two examples, the Black book of capitalism counts deaths of soldiers by war and smallpox, the black book of communism does not. The black book of capitalism counts deaths by poverty, the book of communism does not. I’m sure that if you applied the methods used by the authors of the black book of capitalism on to communist regimes, you could find another 100 million deaths.

“any deathtoll you can come up with and Capitalism still wins in the killcount.”

That’s probably true. But Communism has been around for a shorter time than capitalism, and has covered far less of the worlds surface, which means that if Marxist-Leninist regimes were as widespread as capitalist ones, then the death toll would be higher. As the examples of North and South Korea, East and West Germany, Estonia and Finland, Greece and Bulgaria clearly show, capitalism is better than the Marxist-Leninist alternative at creating wealth and bringing around a higher standard of living.

Gsirrah comments:

Whilst the actions of the new regime were clearly foul, your attempt to show the new regime to be as bad as the Khmer Rouge just shows how much you want to attack Marxist-Leninists and how little you care about contemptible actions when they are committed by capitalists.

I did not say that the new regime was “as bad as the Khmer Rouge” but that “Etcheson highlights there were many in Cambodia who thought that the replacement regime was also guilty of crimes for which they should have been tried.” To quote directly from Etcheson, on page 40 of After the Killing Fields he sates:

On a visit to Cambodia early in 1994, numerous times when some Cambodian citizen inquired about my profession, I would summarize by saying, “It is my job to put Pol Pot in jail.” The response was often something like, “Well, don’t stop there; the government is full of criminals, from top to bottom.”

I fail to agree with your point about “contemptible actions when they are committed by capitalists.” As I stated earlier, my own post was only approximately 700 words. I could not write the history of the world in that post. It was simply a post about the crimes of the Khmer Rouge who were Communist. I have not written about crimes of capitalists and nor have I written about the Industrial Revolution or Henry VIII and his six wives. In 700 or so words, I wrote a little about the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.

‘Solzhenitsyn has quoted figures of 30 -60 million’

Alexander was quite clever there. He quotes an emigre historian at 60 plus million. I think the fella counts Soviet War dead as well. He must do really. The population was about 137 million in 1920 and given drought, malnourishment via collectivisation, mass family planning and total war breached over 180 million by the end of Stalin’s life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union

Most of the evidence points to around 20 million (Applebaum for instance), mostly between 1918 and 1953.

mesquito states:

Mesquito was being, as is his habit, facetious.

I love the word “facetious.” It is the only word that I am aware of that contains one of each vowel and them to all appear in order. This does not have much to do with communism, it is just one of those little facts that I have in my head and I felt like showing off by repeating!

“‘That’s why the ranks of the extreme Leftist parties are drawn from the universities and not from council estates.”

“People preoccupied with the daily struggle for survival generally have no time or interest in revolt”

The ranks, if not the leaders, of virtually all successful radical movements (this includes, for example, democratisation movements in Latin America and South Asia, not just communists) , have been drawn from the peasantry and urban workers. The experience of European communist and revolutionary parties (like the SWP) over the past two decades are hardly grounds for a global sociological judgment.

Research in the field of social movement studies has consistently found that popular mobilisation requires high levels of grievance.

Hey and while we’re talking facile generalisations about ideas alone driving history and genocide, how about we bring in the toxic mix of liberalism, colonialism and callousness that was British rule in Bengal?

Famines under the British

“After stating that the Government of India, with approval of Her Majesty’s Government, were resolved to avert death by starvation by the employment of all means available, the Viceroy first expressed his conviction that ‘absolute non-interference with the operations of private commercial enterprise must be the foundation of their present famine policy.’ This on the ground that ‘free and abundant trade cannot co-exist with Government importation’ and that more food will reach the famine stricken districts if private enterprise is left to itself (beyond receiving every possible facility and information from the government) than if it were paralysed by Government competition.”

so….5.5 million starved

socialrepublican states:

Mikey
you quote Marx after thousands had been killed in Germany and France, tens of thousand in Hungary, Austria and Italy by state authorities. You quote him as he has his paper closed down by the authorites after being aquitted by local juries of incitement. He writes as he awaits arrest, when hundreds faced draconian sentances in Prussian tribunals. This doesn’t make what he said right, merely remember the times.

There is always an excuse by some for the actions of Communists. The joke about defining the Yiddish word “chutzpah” comes to mind:

A child murders both his parents and is subsequently arrested. At the court he is found guilty and before he is sentenced, he pleads with the judge, “Please be lenient on me, I’m an orphan.”

Mikey, thank you for responding to everyone’s comments and also for actually writing about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, something which is not done nearly enough. My issue is entirely with your conclusion.

Nobody of sane mind should ever again be proud to refer to themselves as a Marxist-Leninist.

If somebody so wanted, they could take from the horrors of Cambodia a lesson about the complete lack of morality in America’s foreign policy which continued to provide support to the Khmer Rouge - long after the true scale of events had been revealed - because of America’s implacable opposition to Vietnamese Communism.

This could then be used as a stick with which to beat America, America’s foreign policy, anti-Communists, whoever. I would criticise this as well because the death of 30% of the population of Cambodia is far too significant to be used for partisan politics of this type.

Incidentally, “abstemious” is another one.

>>One can also read the detailed compendium of The Human Cost
>> of Communism in Vietnam.

If you want to make a serious arument about the vietnam war please don’t use 30 old sources. Things written during that time is full off inacuracies, propaganda and serious misstakes and errors. It is true for both left and right leaning writings from that time.

There has been 30 years of serious resarch about the vietnam war. And much of the things written in that document has been proved to be false.

The scolarly consensus about the Vietnamese Landreform today is around 10-15,000 dead, far less than what the document sugests but still quite horrifying (if you for example compare it to the Srebrenica massacre).

I think just about every communist government installed by revolution has been something of a disaster, so I don’t mean this as succour, but the rouge did use nationalist proganda and worked with the monarch (!) in exile in order to gain support and power. Similar to how the nazis put socialism in, it didn’t make them reds but it was a good advertising ploy.

Attempts to make out that their leadership weren’t children of the communist parties and that they didn’t act as one on an international level are obviously whitewash and hogwash.

Bjorn: Its important you mention the reeducation camps (possibly millions went though them and they were not plesant) and oppression short of murder. Like I said, I think the South Vietnamise might have killed more but 2 million people didn’t flee the country without cause.

Gsirrah,

the death of 30% of the population of Cambodia is far too significant to be used for partisan politics of this type.

I think this is fair to a point. However, a point I would like to get across, and I believe is important is that the Khmer Rouge did not exist in a vacuum. It came about after Stalin, Mao and Ho had all tried there versions of Communism and Pol Pot absorbed teachings from each of them.

In his biography of Pol Pot, David Chandler makes, I think, a very perceptive remark:

Revolutionary movements are poorly suited to becoming functioning regimes - the process is painful and contradictory. Revolutionary movements, after all, focus on seizing nations rather than administering them; they are geared toward war. Revolutionaries, for the most part, lack bureaucratic skills and are contemptuous of “government.”

David P. Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot Revised Edition (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 1999) p. 107

The relevance of these points is that I feel that there is something inherently wrong with Marxist-Leninist ideology that leads to such brutal and murderous regimes as Stalin, Mao and Pol. So whilst my point is, as you say, “partisan,” I do not believe that it is an unfair comment.

Incidentally, “abstemious” is another one.

I was not aware of that, so thank you!

>> Bjorn: Its important you mention the reeducation camps
>> (possibly millions went though them and they were not plesant)
>> and oppression short of murder. Like I said, I think the South
>> Vietnamise might have killed more but.

My post was not meant to be a list of North Vieatnamese crimes, I just critized Mikey use of a single source.

If I would have made a list of North Vieatnamese crimes the reeducation camps would ofcource have been on that list.

>> 2 million people didn’t flee the country without cause.
true

Revolutionary movements are poorly suited to becoming functioning regimes - the process is painful and contradictory. Revolutionary movements, after all, focus on seizing nations rather than administering them; they are geared toward war. Revolutionaries, for the most part, lack bureaucratic skills and are contemptuous of “government.”

How true that is.

Bjorn,

I picked that source as it was easily available on line. Guenter Lewy includes a table in his book where he suggests that the VC/NVA assassinated 36,725 people and abducted 58,499 people for various lengths of time between 1957 and 1972.

Source:

Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) p.454

In the same book, on pages 272-279, Lewy discusses in detail some of the VC terror techniques.

Tinter comments:

the rouge did use nationalist proganda and worked with the monarch (!) in exile in order to gain support and power.

Yes, Sihanouk joining the Khmer Rouge to form FUNK was a case of record-breaking stupidity. His reward for this was 4 years under house arrest and the murder of 18 members of his family.

Mikey

So what should be the proper response when thousands are being shot down in the streets of Paris, Venice, Berlin, Buda, Vienna and many more killed and imprisoned by military tribunal?

‘Sorry, sir, for the inconvienence, don’t worry, we’ll clean up those bodies’

Maybe Wolfe Tone should have written to George III saying ‘Whoops, you got us…we were trying it on…sorry about that…our apologises for blunting those bayonets’

You do understand this was written in may 1849, don’t you? You do understand that right? You do know something about the revolutions of 1848, don’t you? You did notice the date of the piece you quoted…right?

If you might consider another great man

‘The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate … I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed’ Churchill, 1910

Was it his wish fulfilled when T4 started up?

RE: “The best way to look at a system of govt is to see how it treats its own people.”-me
Fwanker: Just because Israel treats Israelis well, but treats Palestinians like animals, does not make them enlightened, it makes them racist, xenophobic, and pre-genocide nazis.

A couple of points. 1-I wasn’t just talking about Israel, was talking about the entire liberal democratic western world. It’s telling you use Israel to try to dispute the point.
2-I never said anything about enlightenment. What i did say was that you can judge a regime by how it treats its own people first. If it treats its own people like crap, it’s already8 on the way to mass murder. That doesn’t mean Israel or any other western country is necessarily “enlightened.” (thanks for putting words in my mouth.) it does mean that they’re better places to live with better governments.

I have always found arguing with Marxists/Communists and their sympathizers very tiresome, and i’m loathe to do it any more. The one incontrovertible fact that they can’t get away from is that there is always huge pressure from their imprisoned population to escape to the west, whereas calling the movement from West to Marxist/Communist utopia a trickle would be an exaggeration. And no fancy sophistry can hide that simple fact, which speaks volumes.

Doktor Wer,

Out of interest, have you read, Sean McMeekin’s, History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks? If so, any opinion?

Mikey: Indeed. I’d comment on the madness of the crazed maoists allying with them but its makes more sense than most everything else they did, so…

I think your post on revolutionary movements is telling. The real issue is that communists and other who seize power through force tend to be the last people you would want to govern. I think this is the central point, not “marxist-leninism” being the source of bad government but revolutionary force. Right wing revolutions also have bad outcomes.

Communists who act only through democracy, such as in Italy, Cyprus, India, South Africa, Spain, France ect are not the same. I mean, I think they result in bad government, but only in the normal way a wide range of parties I dislike to, not in terms of the kind of threat you are describing marxism as. Its the revolutions that are the problem, not the dressing.

I see HP still let the utterly bonkers Mikey out to play.

Bless.

His head would explode otherwise

socialrepublican, you comment, referring to my quote from Marx:

You do understand this was written in may 1849, don’t you?

The answer is, “Yes.” But I am also aware that there are many people out there who like to refer to themselves as Marxists. By doing so, they are aligning themselves with this 19th century writer.

If someone were to call themselves Thatcherite, they could not really disassociate themselves from the actions of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Likewise, someone calling themselves a Marxist cannot so easily disassociate themselves with the writings of Karl Marx from the mid 19th century.

spgb gray is a Communist and he has the front to refer to me as “utterly bonkers”! There is not really much to say about that.

‘Pol Pot’s ferocious and obscurantist regime has long puzzled historians and political scientists, but the gradual publication of many of the internal documents produced by the Khmer Rouge from between 1975 and 1978 has assisted understanding.

The documents collected in English translation in a Yale University Press volume called Pol Pot Plans the Future would make interesting reading for anyone who believes that the Khmer Rouge were dedicated to an agrarian, autarkic society.

The five year plan that Pol Pot produced shortly after taking power calls for a massive increase in agricultural production, but it envisages funneling increased yields of rice and other crops overseas, not back to the long-suffering Khmer people. Pol Pot wanted to earn enough foreign revenue from agricultural exports to be able to fund the construction of heavy industry, and in particular steel mills, across Cambodia. He insisted on paying for this crash course in industrialisation without resorting to foreign capital because he believed that taking loans would make Cambodia dependent on foreign powers.

The expulsion of the populations of Phnom Penh and other cities from their homes was partly motivated by Pol Pot’s desire to massively increase the rural labour force, and thereby increase the size of the harvests of rice and other crops. The two other major reasons for the expulsion were probably the Khmer Rouge’s belief that most city-dwellers were its ideological enemies, and the fact that deliveries of humanitarian aid to Cambodia had ended with the collapse of the Lon Nol regime, raising the spectre of mass starvation. (Of course, the incompetence and brutality of the Khmer Rouge ensured that starvation occurred across Cambodia anyway.)

The Khmer Rouge was always a deeply xenophobic organisation, but it was nevertheless strongly influenced by Mao Zedong’s brand of communism. Mao’s China was one of the few countries that Pol Pot’s paranoid regime managed to maintain amicable relations with, and Mao’s Great Leap Forward can be seen as the model for the Khmer Rouge’s five year plan. The Great Leap Forward was a product of Mao’s desire to turn China into an industrialised country with a First World standard of living, and it was as great a disaster as Pol Pot’s plan.

Both Mao and Pol Pot are often considered exemplars of a peasant-based, agrarian communism, but their ambitions and some of their methods actually had more in common with the ‘modernisation theory’ promoted enthusiastically in the capitalist Third World by Western-educated tehnocrats. The reckless attempts to resettle millions of Javanese in remote areas of Suharto’s Indonesia, and thereby raise the country’s agricultural output, have something in common with Pol Pot’s policies. Mao’s forcible ‘proletarianisation’ of millions of peasants during the Great Leap Forward can only remind us today of the enclosure of the countryside in many parts of today’s Third World, and the ‘conversion’ of small landowners into low-wage workers in factories. The ferocity and incompetence of Pol Pot’s regime were exceptional, but some of its ambitions were all too familiar.’

Mikey: have a look at Marx’s letters to Vera Zasulich. Totally different attitude to the countryside and to revolution than the one Pol Pot espoused. A vision of socialism as democratic and decentralisation and ruritarian. Hokey? Maybe. Totalitarian? Not really.

at least a factor of 2. Further, while the Maoists did murder freely, the deliberate ideological murders should not be classed with the economic incompetence of the Great Leap Forward. .

Economic incompetence? I am not convinced here, when you have so many people what do you do with them if you are Chairman Mao? The middle east is a case in point, huge, ecologically, unstainable numbers of people maintained by Western Moral Bakseesh and Western Technological advances! Hamas obviously believes it has peoples to spare unlike Israel!

Mikey attempts to pass himself off as a serious researcher/writer but fails on several aspectsolutionary force against feudal reaction!)

1) he obviously knows nothing of Marx’s writings and thoughts (he has to keep using one quote, from 1849, written in a newspaper from a time of bourgeois revolutions in 1848, where - Mikey will be amazed - Marx supported the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary force against feudal reaction!)

2) he simply rejects the SPGB out of hand and any anti-Bolshevik, socialist (e.g. Martov) ; that is the mark of a faux researcher, ignoring facts that don’t fit

3) I seriously doubt Mikey has read Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Che, Mao and such - and contrasted their ideas with those of Marx. He would find out when he does that they differ pretty significantly.

It’s not that I object to his fifth form papers…err, blogging, sorry… on some of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century. He must try being a little bit more honest, such as telling readers how real communists opposed the gulags, political prisons, murders and dictatorships at the time and not as some after-thought.

ps.

I thought the whole point of comments to a blog entry would be discussion of the views expressed, where the author might learn something from the commentry provided.

Mikey simply refuses to engage in any serious manner with sensible points, like those raised by the non-Bolshevik “socialrepublican”. Apparantly not….

Marx was in no doubt that the working class would have to use violence to achieve socialism as the ruling class wouldn’t shirk at all from using bayonets. The Paris Commune of 1871 bears this out; but I doubt Mikey even knows of the Commune.

A little quote on force and peace from a speech Marx made in the Hague, 1872:

“Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labor; he must overthrow the old politics which sustain the old institutions, if he is not to lose Heaven on Earth, like the old Christians who neglected and despised politics.

But we have not asserted that the ways to achieve that goal are everywhere the same.

You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries — such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland — where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means. This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labor.”

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/09/08.htm

I’m no Marxist, less still a supporter of any form of totalitarian socialism but I think the implications of the post are questionable. Notwithstanding selective quotes there is a good case to suppose that Marx was a supporter of human rights and democratic norms. His vision of a socialist or communist society did not involve a one party state, lack of political freedom and a secret police. There is a line of democratic Marxian socialists from Luxemburg to Schachtman to our current friend Norm.

Leninism and its vanguardism and revolutionary “ethics” was a very signficant depature from Marx. I have no doubt that Trotsky would have continued in the vain of Lenin (c.f. Kronstadt).

That said the really big crimes and numbers, arise from movements / institutions/governments which were not even Leninist-Marxist; led by Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Even the most Leninist anti-counter revolutionary ethics could not possibly justify or explain policies and actions of the above which amount to irrational evil genocide.

I think revolutionary socialism is a idea that will always fail, ending up with state which is totalitarian to a greater or lesser extent but this by no means equates to genocide and mass murder. East Germany was a horrible regime but was not on any kind of par with the likes of Stalin’s USSR.

SPECIAL FEATURE Was the Khmer Rouge Misunderstood?

Graces the front cover of September 2008’s front cover of
New Internationalist Magazine

http://www.newint.org/features/special/2008/09/01/cambodia-year-zero/

No I am really not joking.

Norman Geras covered this briefly in August

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/08/please-dont-let-them-be-misunderstood.html

But the actual article is far worse:

Cambodia Year Zero on trial reads like a bad parody of a cultural relativists radical and ‘controversial’ critique where ‘lawyer and Anthropologist’ Brooks Duncan (a pseudonym) ‘dares to raise some of the questions the court will try to ignore’.

Criminalise is the word that Brookes Duncan, chooses to demonstrate a process of illegitimate judgement upon ideas and political ideologies while leaving those in the Nixon administration in the early 70s responsible for bombing Cambodia unpunished.

This nausea inducing argument states that the War crimes trial is a sham show trial that will seek to ‘criminalise’ five aged Khmer Rouge leaders.

It might seem bizarre for an alleged lawyer to criticise a criminal trial for seeking to criminalise individuals and actions as well criminal, but this term reveals that Duncan is an academic deconstructionist ‘crit’ or legal theorist rather than an actual lawyer.

Similarly he uses anthropological arguments of cultural relativism to wholly whitewash the Khmer Rouge as some kind of indigenous cultural response to Western colonialism and neo-imperial US aggression.

He creates an imaginary political defence for the Khmer Rouge leaders on trial that is so obscenely demented that one can but hope that they have retained him as counsel.

The trial he alleges will merely result in;

Criminalizing rural development: deaths from disease, malnutrition and overwork

Criminalizing the Khmer Rouge for opposing the hierarchy and passivity created by the French.

Criminalizing the Khmer Rouge for behaviour that may need treatment: the defence of not guilty by reason of insanity.

This is the apology for the Khmer Rouge that I , still possessing some naive hope for the world, thought could never be written and there it is.

Left Liberal Hawk

yours is the kind of honest, anti-socialist criticism I have respect for.

Marx was indeed a revolutionary in the Western democratic mould. He famously wrote against press censorship and called for the working class franchise. He valued the working class vote as a means to establish the rule of labour. And of course, his central tenet was that of working class self emancipation. Given Marx viewed society in (developed) Capitalism as consisting of the proletarians and bourgeoisie, it is clear he is talking of a mass movement, ie. a democratic movement.

Marxism-Leninism is a contradiction in terms. “Marxism” (a word I’ve never particularly liked anyway) grew out of western political thought; Leninism though is a product of the conditions pertaining to semi-feudal, Czarist Russia and the struggle to overthrow the Czar by the intelligentsia.

There is a wonderful pamphlet from the 1930s, written by an American Marxist Rudolf Sprenger called “Bolshevism” which offers a pretty good demolition job of the Bolshevik ideology. The Socialist Standard reviewed it in 1939; it can be viewed here (.pdf file)
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/archive/sprenger%281939%29.pdf

I have responded to most people on this thread so far, but I really cannot be bothered to respond to spgb gray, he is a troll who hero worships Karl Marx, despite all the evidence of death and destruction that has been carried out by those whose religious texts start with The Communist Manifesto. His assumptions about what I have and have not read are also without merit.

@Left-Liberal Hawk

You claim that Stalin, Mao and Pol-Pol were not Marxist-Leninst. I repeat what I said to “Dave” earlier in this thread:

all Communist parties seem to disagree with each other and refer to another Communists party politics as not properly Marxist-Leninist. We only have to look at the debate surrounding the Sino-Soviet split or the debate amongst Troytskyist groups as to whether the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ state of state capitalist. These differences of opinion went on and continue, but the fact is that they all consider themselves to be Marxist-Leninist.

mettaculture,

Thank you very much for highlighting that article in The New Internationalist, the response by Professor Geras and your own commentary.

I see….

Mikey writes trashy anti-communist propaganda and attacks a communist who (for some bizarre reason that escapes me) comments on his blogs.

He calls it trolling, no less!

Oh well, put your fingers in your ears and talk to like-minded if you must.

Mikey, ideas do not govern the progress of history. There is not one sacred interpretation that adheres to every text, concept or ideology, that everyone follows, ignorant of the material world and their own intellectual background and influences, as if they were trains on tracks. It is the height of vapidity to trace the catastrophic events of 150 years of rapid historical change, colonialism, exploitation, total war back to Marx’s writings, and blame them for a gamut of horrific, but wildly diverse events and political actors, just because some of them have used elements of the discourse he helped establish to legitimise their actions.

To illustrate, the repression of indigenous political movements across and the despotic and vicious rule of colonial regimes across the world were legitimised by European states according to the justification of ‘civilisational progress’ and very high-minded rights to guide primitive peoples towards self-government, free trade and liberty. This was bullshit window-dressing for the reality of brutal exploitation and European inter-state competition.

Yet we don’t look at all the horrors of the famines caused by forced requisitions of food, punitive taxes, the suppression of political movements, the 500 000 Algerians killed in the struggle for independence, or whatever, and say it was the IDEA of western civilisation, of liberal-democracy, that did it, solely - even if colonial regimes used these very same ideas to justify themselves. And rightly so…because to discuss processes as they happened and to draw any meaningful lessons from them, we look at history as a product of the interaction between social, political and economic and ideological change.

Moreover, as SPGB has made clear, any sensible reading of Marx’s work makes it quite clear he is far from being anything resembling a totalitarian. And at his time of writing, revolutionary movements had been sprouting all across Europe since the French Revolution, and would have continued to do so with or without Marx’s writings. They were responses to real injustice and oppression, and not just of the economic kind that weak-kneed liberals seem happy to ignore - but over issues like suffrage, democracy, free speech, rights to unionise.

Marx’s writings were just by far the most philosophically and rhetorically sophisticated, and well-timed for efficacy which explains their spread and influence into hugely varied contexts - which they did not account for - e.g. Russia, where no sizeable ‘working-class’ existed during Marx’s time. This has also made Marx attractive and easily adapted to situations that his writings were not intended to guide - as the first port of call for revolutionary movements seeking theoretical tools and legitimation. So the Shining Path could use them, but so could the non-violent Socialist/Socialist Democrat parties that were the first targets of European fascists.

Blaming Marx’s brand of communism, as the lodestar from which all the 20th century’s totalitarian horrors emanate from, is ridiculous.

They would probably have happened with or without him - or do you seriously think, for example, in China, that after 150 years which saw hundreds of millions die of famine, civil-war and Japanese invasion, as a Western liberal democracy, or a social democracy in the 1950s? Or any other outcome we’d view positively? Or do you think under Tsarist repression, some form of violent revolutionary movement would not have come about without Lenin or Marxism?

* that after 150 years which saw hundreds of millions die of famine, civil-war and Japanese invasion, THE OUTCOME would be a Western liberal democracy

Waseem,

Thank you for your post. If you reread my main post you will see that I used the following phrase to vent my loathing: “Marxist-Leninist.” I did not simply say Marxist. There is simply no denying that Lenin was a totalitarian dictator.

In his 1875 work, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx referred to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Marxists can put any explanation they wish on this term and I am sure spgb gray and his cohorts do, but Lenin was absolutely clear in 1920 when he wrote:

The scientific concept, dictatorship, means neither more nor less than unlimited power resting directly on force, not limited by anything, not restrained by any laws or any absolute rules. Nothing else but that.

Or do you think under Tsarist repression, some form of violent revolutionary movement would not have come about without Lenin or Marxism?

I thought we were talking about the actual horrors of the European totalitarianism which was inspired by the “by far the most philosophically and rhetorically sophisticated” writings of Karl Marx (henceforward referred to as “the reality”) rather than the impossible to prove counterfactual of what might oe might not have happened had the followers of Marx or those who used the followers of Marx to assume complete dictatorial powers not actually murdered millions during the course of the 20th century.

And at his time of writing, revolutionary movements had been sprouting all across Europe since the French Revolution, and would have continued to do so with or without Marx’s writings.

Maybe so. But in the absence of the influence of Louis Blanc and Marx, they might have been more successfully guided by the example set by the likes of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

In fact, this is one reason why the Left across the world hates Britain and America more than anything else: it’s not just that they are the consumate “imperialists”, so deft that many of their former colonial subjects wish they hadn’t decolonised, but they are also much better at this revolution business than anyone else, being the only two peoples to have successfully pulled it off without totalitarian consequences.

Dangermouse, seeing as the topic has more or less died, I felt at liberty to go slightly, but not fully OT, in order to make the case that though the use of Marx to think about politics is linked to the justification of terrible totalitarianisms, it did not create them, but has been distorted in their name - and that thinking about politics using Marx is not a priori idiocy, or necessarily a precursor to being totalitarian

My point is not that philosophical and theoretical sophistication prevents a set of ideas from being used, amongst other ideological justifications to legitimise terrible practices. They can and in Marx’s case, have. But that is an accusation that can be levelled just as easily at the use of other doctrines in the past, such as liberalism, free trade, civilisational progress, the nation-state. This does not provide an a priori criticism of their use - it is the way they are used, and the context they are used in that seems to be a more useful subject of criticism. A Swedish social democrat in the 1960s citing Marx means something far different from a leader of the Khmer Rouge doing so that. And one would use different arguments against each - going for the fact that both have them have Marx floating around in their heads doesn’t explain much.

If you sometimes think radical change to remedy injustice or oppression is necessary, then the spectre of violence always seems to arise - the example of the American Revolution Doktor Wer just mentioned was no exception. Whether that leads to totalitarianism depends more on a huge range of contextual circumstances than simply on whether or not someone was a ‘follower of Marx’. If we are talking about the horrors of totalitarianisms, and want to explain how they come about, and how to stop them arising in the future, gunning for Marxism is useless:

Firstly, a reading of Marx’s work would make it clear that the interpretative gymnastics required to justify totalitarianism using him is akin to saying the Bible directly justifies Crusades.

Secondly, those interpretative gymnastics CAN be done - the creators of the totalitarian horrors of the 20th C were doing precisely that - interpretative gymnastics. So they were not ‘followers of Marx’ at all. They were working with whatever tools they had to hand to construct revolutionary (and then totalitarian) politics - and the reason they were drawn to these approaches is explained by their indigenous circumstances - e.g. autocratic power, extreme repression, mass violence and societal breakdown in Russia.

The approach you outlined, that suggests that would-be and actual totalitarians were applying Marx, as if from a blueprint, to their respective situations, is fallacious - ideas do not operate in human history like templates for action.

Where I will agree with Mikey’s approach is that large portions of the European left have often been duped, or duped themselves into thinking they are watching the unfolding of progress (e.g. in the Soviet Union in the 1920s), when they have actually been witnessing the beginnings of a catastrophe. But that is not the case for the whole of the left. But it is an evidence-based argument against the ways in which interpreters of Marx in their comfy homes have viewed revolutions in other countries.

And that goes on to why people are attracted to radical change, what makes them likely to sympathise with it, and ignore the likelihood that terrible things are happening that they aren’t witnessing. This in turn goes onto a wider argument against revolutionary change, no matter what they say about the prescribed means (and Marx prescribed none). But that is a separate argument against radical change and revolutions in general, rather than at any facets of Marx’s theory. And I would say that Doktor Wer brought up the American Revolution, which is widely taken to be a successful and justified revolution - but revolutionary actors cannot easily predict how quickly violence will develop, and whether totalitarian consequences will proceed - they don’t always. And the justifications for radical change can be very strong - see Burma, Nepal, or any of the Latin American Cold War contexts. So I also think an argument against revolutions per se seems hard to justify.

And Doktor Wer - thanks, I agree that would be a counter-factual, but I think unlikely - the contexts for workers and peasants radicalised in 19th C Europe were far different than that for American colonists in the 18th C - the development of capitalism in its most openly exploitative stage, together with severe political oppression seemed to necessitate a struggle for a justice that went well beyond the arrangement of political institutions, and into social and economic life. In some places in Europe that happened gradually, through the halting development of social democratic states (now being reversed) and in the areas of most severe repression was either crushed, or developed into something much worse. And in colonial contexts, I think conditions were always far more conducive to mass radicalisation and totalitarianism - though thankfully the technologies of control and repression provided possibilities far smaller than that given to the Nazis.

Anyway, just my thoughts - only posted because the thread seems quiet, else I wouldn’t go on so much.

When Marx is interpreted in what is considered a progressive manner (such as by Althusser and Gramsci) this is a natural progression of his work. But when they are interpreted in a bad way (such as by Lenin and Stalin) these are perversions of his thoughts. That sounds like an argument that can always pick and choose amongst examples with the benefit of hindsight to me.

It is a good thing we have some people who will keep the words of the Gods pure forevermore.

A Swedish social democrat in the 1960s citing Marx means something far different from a leader of the Khmer Rouge doing so that. And one would use different arguments against each - going for the fact that both have them have Marx floating around in their heads doesn’t explain much.

What do you reckon about the proposal that Proudhon influenced muggers even though they had never read his works?

;-)

Dangermouse: well, I wouldn’t agree with Althusser personally (he was in many ways a Stalinist). I would also say that yes, that you’ve accurately captured the way a lot of leftist theorists used to approach Marx. But I’m not arguing that - I think its a mistake to talk about perversions and faithfulness - Althusser, Gramsci, Lenin and Stalin all claimed, for rhetorical, ideological and practical reasons to be faithful interpreters or developers of Marx.

But that’s not what they were doing in writing, in practice, in thought - and they were obviously operating in a completely different context. They were doing their own thing, not perverting or merely interpreted. So they should all be judged on their own merits, and the dangerous ways they use Marx (and any other theorists) should be assessed according to the merits of that particular use.

And what you’re saying about the use of hindsight isn’t quite fair - I’m not saying that ethical and political judgement of a movement or a theorist’s political arguments should be suspended just because they/he/she invokes magical Marx. The opposite! I’m saying we should look at what the argument, the movement, the practices, its history on its own terms and not judge it a priori because they’ve uttered a forbidden name.

E.g. Stalin versus Gramsci. Stalin created a toxic blend of realpolitik and totalitarianism in thought and practice to legitimate his own power grab within the profoundly undemocratic structures of the Bolshevik party. His rise was so disastrous because it took place in the midst of a party forged in the most radical wing of a ruthlessly repressed working-class movement in a highly-polarised and war-devastated Russian society, then emerging through a vicious Civil War which loosened any inhibitions the Bolsheviks had about the application of massive state power. The development of totalitarianism in Russia seems more deeply related to the disastrous course of the early 20th C, to modernisation, and to Russia’s political history, than to anything like Marxist theory. Leninism was a revolutionary strategy - it claimed to be filling in the blanks for Marx, to come to his ends, but they made up the ends, and let their own means overrun anyway!

This same party had already crushed the Mensheviks, who were the only mass-based, mass-membership Marxist-socialist party in the country. They were both broadly associated with Marxist ideology, but the former’s dominance would have meant a very different future for Russia. But the Bolsheviks, through efficient organisation, propaganda, force, whatever won out - and not for any reasons related to Marx.

Gramsci created a complex theory of cultural hegemony that didn’t owe that much to Marx, though arising from that milieu. It didn’t have much in the way of totalitarian components. He also wrote from an Italian fascist prison, while trying to understand how it was that fascism came to dominate society - and his thought must be understood in that context - a context so radically different from Stalin’s, that it hardly seems we are talking about the same theories! Gramsci’s understanding of society and how progress comes about seems so far from Stalinist/Khmer Rouge totalitarianism that I can’t see any plausible trajectory that would lead from one to the other, unless the same processes that emerged in Russia (war, social disintegration, civil war, Leininist party) came about - and Gramsci was certainly not hoping for this!

I think every interpretation and political argument ought to be judged by its own merits according to its own context. I don’t think that’s relativism - I think the relativism comes in when deciding on the ‘merits’. They’re the real shitter

Graham: haha - all I know is that the people I knew influenced by Proudhon tended to be the sort of gimps that ranted about bringing capitalism closer to its final catastrophe and went and bought big macs on that basis…