Excuse me. The Soviet Union was officially socialist, not communist, which is why it’s the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Communist Party was supposed to consist of people who had already reached communism and would lead the masses out of socialism to the wonders of communism, where the State would wither away. Authoritarian socialism was supposed to be the path to the end of states and nationalism.
According to Marxist-Leninism, a Communist state society has never existed.
Maybe Rojava will finally manage it.
In places other than the Land of the Eternal Micky Mouse Copyright, there are plenty of ebook copies of it.
http://www.gutenberg.ca/#catalogueO
And for the subliterate, there’s the movie.
Made me go look it up. Well - good luck to their endeavors!
I am not going to argue semantics. People can’t completely agree on what Socialism and Communism mean. There is the Marx definition, and the dictionary definition that is broader. In the broad terms, socialism is the state gathering and dispersing goods and resources, and communism is the state is also the means of production. Which the USSR had in spades. The first sentence of the Economy of the Soviet Union on wiki is “The economy of the Soviet Union was based on a system of state ownership of the means of production, collective farming, industrial manufacturing and centralized administrative planning.”
Though I am fully aware and acknowledge that Soviet brand communism isn’t the exact brand Marx was talking about, and their ideals on paper didn’t look like the reality of how it was run.
And what you name your State is hardly indicative of what it actually is. See: German Democratic Republic and German Democratic Republic and Syrian Arab Republic.
It’s not about semantics but the meaning of words and ideas. The distinction is much more significant than you suggest.
For instance, until it was removed in 1995, the Constitution of the British Labour Party explicitly said that the State should own the means of production, distribution and exchange (Clause 4), and it was a socialist, not a communist, party.
Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto and I guess they get to define what it is, especially as both the Soviet Union and China both explicitly endorsed this philosophy, both having Communist Parties that fulfil the role of the priesthood in Christianity.
For anybody interested - as I am - in sociology of religion, the way that the Soviet Union and China basically replicated the same power structure as the Church is worthy of consideration. Because the US tended to refer to the Soviet Union as “commies” doesn’t mean they get to define the words.
But it’s still not a broad enough definition. Libertarian Socialism has been around for 150-200 years in various forms, yet according to the dictionary that you use it cannot be socialism as they believe in other forms of organisation that can not be described as the state.
Oh, I get it. Thank you.
I tried reading that speach but had to stop due to its pointless ramblings.
Except for the Eurocommunists and the left-communists and the anarchist-communists and (in the UK at least) the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Well, as you point out, under the Marxist conception of Communism the state would have withered away, so a Communist state would be a contradiction in terms …
</pedantry>
Donate generously - won’t you?..for the victims.
Guys, I am aware of the rich and varied political views, some with which overlap with Communism in name and ideals and that Soviet Communism isn’t the only Communism out there.
But come on.
Even though there were non-authoritarian groups, and members of a Communist party in various political positions within various countries, and many countries enjoy various degrees of socialism - my original statement “Well, to be fair, in the 80s the Communists WERE all authoritarian.” was in reference to the obvious giant bears in the room such as the USSR, China, North Korea, the Soviet Controlled Eastern Bloc, Laos, Vietnam, and many other countries. And they have documented spectacular failures on many levels, creating some of the harshest human rights violations in modern human history, and made Hitler look like an amateur as far as numbers go.
I guess I should have been MORE accurate and said, “…in the 80s the Communists countries WERE all authoritarian.” But I though it was pretty clear what I was talking about, and shouldn’t require an asterisk and disclaimer that there were various other groups with some political power, but were still in otherwise Democratic countries.
Indeed I believe originally a “soyuz” was a worker’s council.
I have mentioned this before but on one occasion I was on a course with the worker-appointed managing director of a workers’ cooperative. It somewhat blew the minds of some of the other attendees…but then when Motorola made phones in Scotland, the workers formed self-organising cooperative teams. It worked, but they still couldn’t beat the dirt cheap labour of supposedly socialist China.
Yeah, no. The Nazis are generally reckoned to have killed 11 million people (Holocaust + other non-combatant deaths). Stalin is typically said to have killed ~20 million. Given that he was in power twice as long as Hitler, there’s not much to choose between them in strict average-murders-per-year terms.
The second paragraph is important. In the first paragraph @Glaurung was being descriptive, not ironic, but that only becomes clear if you read the whole post.
Um… Yugoslavia?
the more things change… 
In a real sense we are all, even more than those who died, the victims of the bowling Green massacre.
Everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news about the Bowling Green Massacre.
Most of the time when I see the right pushing the “Stalin worse than Hitler” meme, they include all the Nazis killed by the Red Army in Stalin’s death toll. Plus every Soviet famine death etc. If they’re really pushing it, they’ll also add the Red Army soldiers killed by the Wehrmacht.
The biggest red flags (no pun intended) that I’ve seen are the white supremacists that blame the Jews for Holodomor… while still blaming Stalin in the next sentence.
Left or right or in the middle, one would be hard pressed to find a positive spin on Stalin. Yes I would include the famine deaths, because the polices contributed directly to how bad it got and why relief didn’t come. I wouldn’t include soldier deaths from WWII, though things like the Katyn massacre I would (sneaky bastards even tried to pin it on the Germans).
But I wasn’t trying to make it a Stalin vs Hitler thing. I was encompassing ALL of them - the Great Purge, the Great Leap Forward, The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, The Kiling Fields, and the various large scale famines in China, Russia, and North Korea and other places.
