Some billionaires told me so.
Meanwhile, the communists I know are all saying “Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the rest: We don’t need your “promise of America”—we need a revolution to put an end to your system” and are pointing out that Harris and Walz are “putting the joy in genocide”. I guess they aren’t real communists? I should listen to Trump & Musk when they tell me what communism is?
It’s all so confusing.
Has no one thought of branding the bright new – unburdened by the past – policies as Kamanism?
Revolutions rarely lead to better outcomes. None of the “communist” ones did. People who seize power by violence because they think they know better than anyone else do not subsequently respond well to being proven wrong on something and/or being asked to share that power.
A slow progress through democratic means is frustrating and imperfect, but in my opinion preferable.
@Charly #2: The revolution won’t be televised.
Chiapas and Rojava did pretty well, and were not particularly bloody.
Those billionaires and their friends control a big slice of the public discourse, so they get to decide what “communism” means to their audience.
We really need to stop worshiping powerful people.
Charly @2
What about China and Vietnam?
When they inevitably mention the apocryphal figure of 100 million dead thanks to communism, a lie from The Black Book of Communism, ask them if the British Raj was communist since it was responsible for an estimated 100 million deaths in India.
Charly @2 — Not so sure about that one, either. I have a lot of problems with Lenin and his followers, but I’d say it’s hard to argue that the Russian Revolution didn’t improve things in Russia, at the very least. Whether the result was any better than places like the US or western Europe is up for debate, but it was most definitely preferable to serfdom under the Tsars. Now, whether it was better for any of the other countries in eastern Europe is even more up for debate, but I’m not inclined to give all that much benefit of the doubt to the known empire that came before.
The problem, in my estimation, wasn’t so much thinking they knew enough better than the people already in charge to be willing to displace them with force, and more that they seemed to think they already knew everything that could possibly be relevant. They turned on their own allies eagerly, even in the middle of a war, because they were so certain that they had already accounted for everything that could ever be, simply by adhering to their doctrine, and any concept of disloyalty to the doctrine was treated as a greater threat to the “inevitable” glorious destiny of communism than capital itself. You don’t have to believe yourself functionally omniscient in order to think you know enough better than the current ruling class to replace them and their system with something better.
Walter Solomon @6 — Or just point out that that figure is so ridiculously inflated that the propaganda book’s own co-authors disavowed it, and includes such nonsense as invading Nazis and the estimated disparity between the number of infants born and the number that would have been had previous birthrates continued. It is unbelievably dishonest.
That seems too high.
IIRC, the death toll from communism is more like 25 million though.
Stalin killed millions in his purges and the Gulag.
Stalin also set off the Holodomor, the famine that killed maybe 5 million people in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
Mao managed to kill 20 million or so in the famines of the 1950s.
A lot the deaths in the USSR and China were due not to malevolence but incompetence. The famines had a lot to do with Lysenkoism and the subsequent agricultural failures.
Fascism killed more.
It’s estimated that the death toll from World War II was around 50 million.
They also invented industrialized mass murder with their concentration camps which killed an estimated 6 million civilians.
The Catholic church and xianity also managed to kill tens of millions at a time when the world population was a lot smaller than the 20th century.
18 million died in a civil war started by a heterodox xian in China.
The USA is a runner up, having killed 1 million or so Vietnamese in a pointless war that we ended up losing anyway.
Communist? She ain’t even socialist atually..
Just somewhat slightly centre left in the spectrum of the very warped to reichwing USA.
Oh & “they” say thast like its a bad thing &, natch, they dunno what it means
Certain values of “they” shouting that shoutily including a whole lotta nazis, Konfederate Slavers and Klansmen natch. Overton Window been chucked all the waaay down the street and into the burning trashfire dump.
Ain’t going back.
Serfdom was abolished in the Russian Empire in 1861; Russia was still extremely unequal of course. The Bolsheviks were neither the only, nor the most popular socialist party: the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had a largely rural base among the peasantry, won a majority of the seats in the Constituent Assembly elected in January 1918, but Lenin wanted absolute power, so the Bolsheviks dispersed the Assembly. Without him (ironically, in view of the Marxist view of history) the “October Revolution” (which took place in November by the Gregorian calendar, and was more of a coup than a revolution) would almost certainly not have happened, and there might have been a broad-based democratic socialist government. Whether the capitalist powers would have tolerated it is difficult to say – their initial intervention occurred because Lenin withdrew from WW1, in effect allowing the Germans to occupy as much as they wanted, but at that stage no Russian government could have remained more than nominally in the war, and the capitalist powers then backed a slew of reactionary would-be dictators even after Germany’s defeat.
@2. Charly : “Revolutions rarely lead to better outcomes.”
American revolution? 1688 Glorious Revlution : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution
Young Turks Revolution & more?
https://list.ly/list/1979-top-10-revolutions-that-changed-the-world#google_vignette
Plenty thats arguable o’çourse..
Hard to define revolution are as might say Yoda.
Simple things are not.
Complex they are, yes?
Eureka stockade. Failed it did.
Revolutions results variable are, goals ideal they are.
Results mixed, what matters here?
Depends on specifics so much does.
Correcting a myth spread by the bolsheviks.
The bona fide Russian revolution occurred in February 1917, and led to the czar being replaced bt the Kerensky government.
The thing in October (November by our calendar) was a coup d’etat, the forces dominated by the Social Revolutionaries, a group that was later physically exterminated by Lenin and his Cheka (later KGB).
The idiocy of Lenin Stalin and Mao certainly led to millions starving to death (the Holodomor was deliberate).
The Chinese great leap forward killed more than 20 million.
Lenin initially refused to let the Red Cross do something about the starvation after the civil war (ironically, a certain Herbert Hoover was in charge of it).
We know what Pol Pot did.
Dictatorical ideologies allow the very worst to reach the top and cling to it by increasing acts of cruelty
@2 Charly
We had several revolutions over here that, while sometimes bloody, made things generally better.
I appreciate that @6 raven talked about more accurate numbers regarding the various slaughters.
I also appreciate that raven mentioned the VERY bloody catholic church corporate slaughters
IIRC stalin made hitler look like an amateur when it came to overall deaths
And, from my perspective the vietnam figure of slaughter by the united states should have an added 53,000+ needless u.s. soldiers that were just government cannon fodder.
The propensity for human beings to slaughter each other is disgusting.(I’m lookin’ at you naziyahoo)
PZ sarcastically wrote: ‘I should listen to Trump & Musk. . .?’
I can’t help but look at those two aholes and agree with Bernie: billionaires should not exist!
I’m going to toss a couple more “Revolutions” into the pot, without judgement. Decide for yourself!
Haitian Revolution.
Icelandic “kitchenware” Revolution.
What??? The October Revolution (or coup) was carried out exclusively by the Bolsheviks. The SRs (incidentally, Kerensky was at least nominally a member) were dominant in the countryside, and were supporting the “land reform” (i.e.confiscation of the land from landlords and distribution among the peasants) being carried out by the peasants themselves. A faction of the SRs, the Left SRs, went along with the Bolshevik seizure of power after the fact and joined the Bolshevik government (but split from the Bolsheviks when the latter agreed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk).
Well, I certainly did not mean that no revolution ever has led to a better outcome, I am fully aware of some that did. Like the Velvet revolution or Euromaidan.
I am not aware of the true ratio of good vs. bad outcome of a revolution so I retract my previous statement and rephrase it thusly:
Revolutions do not necessarily lead to better outcomes. Many of the “communist” ones did not. People who seize power by violence because they think they know better than anyone else do not subsequently respond well to being proven wrong on something and/or being asked to share that power.
A slow progress through democratic means is frustrating and imperfect, but in my opinion preferable (when possible).
I’d add that jerks seek power, and some see the chaos of a revolution as a ladder. So, yeah, radical change is hard to implement. Power corrupts and/or reveals, so be careful how it’s distributed.
I saw a few seconds of a Trump ad the other day in which he starts by talking “Liberal Billionaires taking over the country” or some such inanity. I couldn’t stand much, but I found it amusing that the guy who brags about being a billionaire, and is backed by a bunch of billionaires, is talking trash about other billionaires ruining the country. Trump irony just won’t stop.
Russia did communism wrong. There is a big difference in private land ownership that leads to the ability to create your own private means of production and having everything owned by the state.
Communal land ownership is a feature of communism, but it doesn’t preclude private ownership or profiting from your labor. It just means that some portion of the land will be used, shared, and held in common by the people who may also have private property.
Any wealth from the property is distributed equally to the wider community. I think some wealth redistribution in the USA is long overdue. If you can afford to waste 44 million dollars, you clearly have way too much unearned wealth and need to pay more taxes.
I welcome the minor swing to the left represented by the Harris-Walz ticket.
You mean like the National Forests, National Parks, BLM land, Wildlife Refuges (like Malheur), etc. are communistic?
38% of the USA is owned by…the governments.
How have we survived for over 200 years anyway?
Actually, the ultra rich oligarchies are continually making land grabs for that communally owned land. They call it privatizing it.
No surprise.
No matter how much money, power, land, and stuff they have, they always want more.
When a billion dollars is nothing, then owning a National Forest becomes the new status symbol.
Raven
Public parks are one example, though they are extra communist as they are often set aside as wild land for the benefit of everything that lives there, not just the people.
Others are public schools, roads, libraries, sidewalks, transportation systems and utilities. The billionaires have been trying to privatize the US Postal Service for at least a decade.
In the communist farming colonies of Late Imperial Russia, they paid their taxes in wheat. Ever village had some acreage that was worked communally and the crop used to pay the taxes. Of course any after tax profits would go toward building a school, or a church, or possibly funding a new daughter colony.
“I have a list of over one hundred men in the Department of State who are card-carrying Communists.”
— Sen. Joe McCarthy (no list was ever provided, he was waving the witness list for the following week’s hearing)
“There are exactly fifty-seven card-carrying Communists in the Department of State.”
— Sen. John Iselin (while looking off-camera at a bottle of Heinz ketchup) (The Manchurian Candidate)
I think the second one is a bit more credible…
And we can’t forget Prince & the Revolution. That one was overall quite positive! /wink
Charly @20 — Now that, I can agree with. Violent direct action is incredibly dangerous, not to be used lightly. Further, I’d argue that any revolution incapable of halting its own violence once it’s served its immediate purpose thereby dooms itself. Even so, I have a great many doubts about the potential of incrementalism to do what we need done from where we are now. I get the distinct impression that a great many of the ultra-wealthy scumbags currently driving national and international policy would rather see total human extinction than give up their coercive power.
I am not sure about revolutions except that they are a violent upheaval. They have not been anything like a once and for all event. have a mixed outcome.
looking in the best light. They are a violent extreme reaction to some authority that is perceived unjust in some way
From where I set and look at what people have been doing it is a conflict between democratic self governing ideals and hierarchical authoritarian class ideals. That was the principle conflict during the “cold war” . It was managed by the powerful on both sides to be something different about property and money and nationalism any of the other things that happened that supported by the people for the people were resisted by the power in control with all the force they thought they could get away with they still do.
a revolution is nothing more then an event in time a battle in a long struggle not an end. It is only an end when the next despot takes over, and then it is often only temporary sometimes no more then one mans life span then the struggle renews itself and continues.
@11 StevoR
American revolution?
mmm…. Not so sure about that one – at least from the point of view of the USA. Their subsequently beatified constitution has proved a bit of a disaster. What could you expect from a revolution made by slave owners? Maybe it had a positive impact elsewhere, in the same way that the French Revolution did (i.e. it scared the hell out of the powers that were then).
In general, I’m inclined to think that evolution is better than violent revolution (and that comes precisely because of who ends up leading when violence is their means of coming to power). But not all systems are open to evolution.
Look if the republicans want to associate good things with communism, I’m nor gonna stop them.
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
-Mark Twain
Sharing this song from Carsie Blanton, an Artist I’ve never heard of before. The lyrics are really amusing. Oddly enough, feminists are routinely called communists, witches, etc and this song isn’t about Kamala Harris at all.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-tfH1nty62U
LYRICS
In the morning when I leave my den
I moisturize with the tears of men
stir my tea with a crucifix
I’m an ugly nasty commie b***h