All Power to the Second-Life Soviets!

What’s with the hammer, sickle and tongs?

(Or are they forceps?)

ahahah
but seriously, what is it with leftist parties and splits ?

Well, as Engels has [here speaker assumes Lenin-like pose, finger pointing in air] stated very clearly:

“For the rest, old Hegel has already said: A party proves itself a victorious party by the fact that it splits and can stand the split. The movement of the proletariat necessarily passes through different stages of development; at every stage one section of people lags behind and does not join in the further advance; and this alone explains why it is that actually the ‘solidarity of the proletariat’ is everywhere realised in different party groupings which carry on life and death feuds with one another, as the Christian sects in the Roman Empire did amidst the worst persecutions.”

Splits are also sometimes the result of stuff involving neurochemistry, I think.

“the alliance of workers, peasants, and obstetricians”

Yes indeed, GA Cohen has drawn attention to the significance of the “obstetric metaphor” in Marxism (as in the “birth pangs” of a new social formation).

“What’s with the hammer, sickle and tongs?”

They’re for the salad.

John — perhaps I was prematurely aged by the experience of being “the youth” in Socialist Unity (the pro-Mandel organization among the three groups created by those expelled from the SWP). And that was, shit, 22 years ago?

Besides, this isn’t nostalgia. I really like the hat.

what could be a good symbol to represent walmart (and ikea and them) workers ?

The tongs are to show that they’re subjectively pro-torture. :^)
(Or whatever the smiley is for tongue-in-cheek)

An old story that never goes out of date. Andrew Cockburn’s father had some friends in a sectlet that had split from the Scottish Communist Party (maybe) over ideology. Three months later they split again, which puzzled Cockburn, since there did not appear to be any deep divide between his friends, some of whom were in one camp, the rest in the other. But the answer was revealed by one of the splitters: “We found we were agreeing on everything. It was politically unhealthy.”

Obviously you need tongs if you’re going to go at it hammer and tongs.

It’s not tongs, it’s a roach clip.

Why do W.E.B. DuBois and E.V. Debs look like animatronic zombies in the photo on the CL(TH) website?

The “Scottish Communist Party (Maybe)”? Now that would be something: a millitantly non-bombastic left-wing party!

“I support the FRSO(RS): Somebody Had To”

…Et quand la chambre fut vide
Tous les amis étaient partis
Je suis resté seul avec mon guide,
Nathalie…
Plus question de phrases sobres
Ni de révolution d’octobre
On n’en était plus là
Fini le tombeau de Lénine
Le chocolat de chez Pouchkine
C’était loin déjà…
Que ma vie me semble vide
Mais je sais qu’un jour à Paris
C’est moi qui lui servirai de guide,
Nathalie… Nathalie.

Movements don’t kill people, people kill people.

I think you need to go after pirate outfits Brett. They were bad, bad men.

So if I go the Communist League online store and tell them I need a baseball cap like the above, do they just send it to you gratis?

I suspect dark forces.

“Because it’s always cool to wear gear demonstrating your solidarity with a movement responsible for mass murder, and suffering on a continental scale, right?”

Like an American flag?

Swastika – what is it excess of?

“Because the left is morally obtuse when it comes to it’s own excesses, I think.”

Unlike those who destroy countries in order to save them, who are perfectly self-aware of the moral ambiguity and strategic limitations of American military power, and are always vigilant about restraining its excesses.

I think you need to go after pirate outfits Brett. They were bad, bad men.

I’m concerned about the way costume party-goers blithely celebrate and glamorize our nation’s naughty nurses, a scourge who dishonor the medical ethic they pledge to uphold.

When i want to show my solidarity with a movement responsible for mass murder, I use my Republican National Committee mousepad.

Oh, yeah, the RNC definately has world communism beat for death tolls.

You guys are just making my point: You don’t take the evil of communism seriously! You’d be going berserk at this point if rightwingers were behaving similarly with respect to Nazi style facism, in spite of the fact that it was just a comparative flash in the pan, that racked up considerably smaller death tolls. And is STILL adding to the total today.

I think it’s due to the way the USSR switched sides after helping kick off WWII on the wrong side; Their being our allies for a while ‘saved’ the left from the immense pressure the right felt to repudiated facism. Leaving communism, for all it’s horror, still somewhat respectable on the left.

I thought as a proud libertarian you might wanna go easier on utopian doctrines, Brett.

47: People with movements kill people
They should lay off the curry.

Feh, Will, just more excuses. “They may have murdered a lot more people, but, damn it, they were intellectuals! They CAN’T have been worse than the Nazis!”

Yeah, they could be, because they were intellectuals, and had a theory, a theory which was wrong. And their approach to humanity not fitting the theory was more Procrustean than empirical.

For that, if nothing else, intellectuals should despise communism more than the average run of people, because it was, and is, a perversion of intellectualism, not a manifestation of it.

Cut it out, Brett. I have the monopoly on contrarian righteous indignation on this blog. Go find another corner to hang out on.

Brett: I think it’s due to the way the USSR switched sides after helping kick off WWII on the wrong side; Their being our allies for a while ‘saved’ the left from the immense pressure the right felt to repudiated facism. Leaving communism, for all it’s horror, still somewhat respectable on the left.

Yeah, that’s definitely part of it.

Also there’s the fact that communism was (and still is) actually part of some genuinely constructive movements in the West is part of it, too; things like free public education, abolition of child labour and universal suffrage, now considered by most to be basics of a liberal society, were once “transitional demands” of communists.

Also there’s the quotidian level of things; your local communist dudes are often activists in relatively anodyne causes like Food Not Bombs, whereas your local skinheads are usually activists in stomping whomever they can get away with stomping. So fascism feels like a readily vile and present threat in a way that communism doesn’t.

Also there’s the fact that communism is pretty much a spent force in international affairs, with degraded remnants hanging in in Cuba and North Korea and the leading “communist” state of the day (China) having long ago morphed into a kind of Mussolini-esque corporate state. So communist iconography feels quaint and unthreatening, unattached to the big, scary totalitarian movements of yore, in a way that fascist iconography — which is attached to vital and surging neo-fascist movements in Europe and India, say — does not.

I’m not unsympathetic to your annoyance, but given those factors combined, it’s probably a waste of time to burst your spleen every time you see a hammer and sickle or a Che shirt.

Well, yeah, that is a factor: So long as communists are relatively powerless, AND don’t see an opportunity to gain power by violence, they’re comparatively harmless. As is just about any totalitarian movement.

But it still leaves the question of why such enormous effort has been expended, (And, yes, I know it has been.) trying to salvage something of an ideology that has such hideous consequences every time somebody tries to put it into effect. Isn’t the belief that there’s something there to salvage just part of the left’s irrational nostalgia concerning communism?

Sorry: the Mensheviki were Marxists. I’m not sure they ever officially called themselves `communist’ off the top of my head.

“communist atrocities should be viewed (at least in part) as simply a backlash, violent reaction to the excesses of Brett’s favorite doctrine”

That goes part of the way. A compelling case can be made *for* small-c communism, and *against* large-C Communism of the Bolshevik-Stalinist variety.

Most of the atrocities carried out by Communist governments and movements derive from the perversion of Marxist ideology by Lenin, and his direct application of Jacobin political theory to the problem of governance and the state.

Right-wing noise machines have obscured the fact that vast sections of the revolutionary left were anti-Bolshevik, whether council communists like Pannekoek and Luxembourg, revolutionary socialists like Orwell and Jaures, or the entire anarchist movement which remained strong until WW II. The Bolsheviks’ first, loudest critics were anarchists like Emma Goldman and socialists like Victor Serge.

The role of the white terror and counter-revolutionary violence cannot be discounted – Arno Mayer’s “The Furies” makes the case – but backlash cannot explain away either the Stalinist purges of the 1930’s or the disasters of Mao’s cultural revolution in the 1960’s.

Not only the white terror and counter-revolutionary violence; I’m arguing a much stronger case: that the ‘revolutionary communism’ doctrine itself (with all its excesses) is a natural reaction to the decisively dystopian reality of Brett-favored doctrine of unlimited property rights/government steering clear of any kind of regulations or top-down wealth redistribution. Therefore, Brett is responsible for pretty much the totality of the phenomenon, the good the bad and the ugly. I feel generous this morning.

“Whenever hells have been constructed in Marx’s name – maybe a necessary consequence of trying to implement that vision – they are still a perversion of that vision.”

You see, that’s the problem with this romantic attachment to an ideology that’s resulted in horror every time somebody seriously tried to implement it. You’re like somebody who thinks bleeding really is a cure for anemia, and that the bone white dead bodies piling up are just a result of improper implementation.

No, they’re a result of the fact that communism is not a system for humans, who are not hive organisms. The failure on the part of those who think well of communism to recognize this, no matter how many times their noses are rubbed in it, is what makes this rosy colored view of the deadliest totalitarian ideology of the 20th century so dangerous: Give you power, and you’ll try it yet again!

That’s cute, Abb1; The mass murdering ideology is a reaction to the economic system that lifted the masses out of wretched poverty, so all those murders are really the fault of capitalism, even though they’re curiously enough not happening where capitalism is practiced.

But of course murders have been happening where capitalism is practiced; I mentioned the WWI and the colonial wars of the industrial revolution and post-industrial revolution period.

Take Congo, for example, a small country. According to wikipedia:

In the absence of a census (the first was taken in 1924),[8] it is even more difficult to quantify the population loss of the period. Casement’s 1904 report set it at 3 million for just twelve of the twenty years Leopold’s regime lasted; Forbath, at least 5 million; Adam Hochschild, 10 million; the Encyclopædia Britannica gives a total population decline of 8 million to 30 million.

Was King Leopold a communist? Hardly. Then why wouldn’t this kind of thing shatter you confidence in capitalist ideology?

My Russian history professor was born and raised in the USSR, and grew up disgusted and cynical with the regime and its official ideology. His father only escaped certain death in the Great Terror when the man that was set to denounce him got denounced first. He read Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror in samizdat under the covers with a flashlight while he was in college in the early 1980s, and is a big fan of Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism. The officials once tried to recruit him to report on his classmates, and he was certainly aware that some of his classmates were spies themselves. He is definitely not a Marxist, and I’m pretty sure he isn’t a devotee of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Nonetheless, he always insisted on drawing a distinction between the evil of the Nazis, and the crimes of the Communists. The difference in his mind, I think, was the difference between a monstrous ideology (Nazism) and one capable of a monstrous interpretation (Communism). (I am stealing that line from somewhere, I just can’t remember where). And I think one point Zizek raised is legitimate—that is the persistence of dissident Communists, compared to the lack and, indeed, inconceivability of dissident Nazis.

The mass murdering ideology is a reaction to the economic system that lifted the masses out of wretched poverty

Yeah, now who’s romanticizing?

“Yeah, now who’s romanticizing?”

Anybody who thinks capitalism didn’t lift the masses out of wretched poverty, of course. Without capitalism there isn’t sufficient economic productivity for the masses to be anything BUT wretchedly poor.

Ach! My snarky use of strikethrough backfires! Why did it show up on preview but not in the post? Must be the fucking communists.

I don’t have a stake in this. I think Naziism is much worse than Communis, which isn’t explicitly bad, but I’ve always found the rationalizations and apologetics for the seemingly inevitable brutality of any strain of actual existing communism by the leftover left as “deviations” or perversions of the true faith, to be pretty weak intellectually and loathsome morally. But as it relates to individual Communists and Nazis, a person who some times writes for this very blog said something very useful once. My html skills are even worse than my grammar, but if you click on his name above, which is linked by crookedtimber.org to his personal weblog and type the word ‘nazi’ in the search box, you should come across an entry titled “Have you stopped murdering your political opponents?” with the good stuff.

I think you might have a point if I was an American liberal eager to defend America’s foreign policy over the last 5 years; I’m not. Nor would I ever argue that America’s foreign policy over the last 5 years is somehow a deviation from a righteous, relatively stainless past. Foreign actions undertaken by Imperial states are almost always dumb and cruel.

Also I think communist states are pretty brutal and intellectual apologetics on behalf of the body counts to be pretty weak.

Generally, any radical socio-economic change tends to cause a long period of turmoil and violence, this is not communist-states-specific. French Revolution, American Civil War, even decolonization in most places. That’s just how it is, pardon my determinism.