Museum of Communism FAQ Version 1.2
Rick Cordes
answer appears untrustworthy. Would anyone who feels
knowledgeable like to critique it or refer me to
where it has been?
> Museum of Communism FAQ
>...
> 10. To what extent did Communist totalitarianism derive...
> From Marx's political and philosophical theories?
>...
> o Marx and totalitarianism
>
> Lenin's commitment to totalitarianism, in both theory and
> practice, is essentially beyond dispute. The view of his
> precursor Karl Marx is more ambiguous, both because Marx wrote
> less clearly than Lenin, and because Marx never held power. In
> spite of this, the totalitarian strain in Marx is pronounced. He
> directs much of his critique against the classical liberal
> concern for personal freedom and private property - the Rights of
> Man, or what Marx called "bourgeois freedom." The doctrine of the
> rights of man was faulty, according to Marx, because:
>
> None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go
> beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of
> civil society; that is, an individual separated from
> the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly
> preoccupied with his private interest and acting in
> accordance with his private caprice... Thus man was not
> liberated from religion; he received religious liberty.
> He was not liberated from property; he received the
> liberty to own property. He was not liberated from the
> egoism of business; he received the liberty to engage
> in business.
> On the Jewish Question
>
> For Marx, freedom of religion or the freedom to own property are
> hollow freedoms, or at least grossly inadequate stepping stones
> to something better: "political emancipation itself is not human
> emancipation." "[B]ourgeois 'freedom of conscience' is nothing
> but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of
> conscience, and that for its part [socialism] endeavors rather to
> liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion." (Critique
> of the Gotha Program). Rather than advocating freedom for all
> people, liberals really value only the freedom of the ruling
> class of capitalist society, viz., the bourgeoisie.
>
> Marx accuses the liberal tradition of slighting the social nature
> of man. "Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything which
> does not harm others... It is a question of the liberty of man
> regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself." Marx
> elaborates: "The right of property, is, therefore, the right to
> enjoy one's fortunes and dispose of it as he will; without regard
> for other men and independently of society... It leads every man
> to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the
> limitation of his own liberty." (On the Jewish Question)
>
> Marx's solution, the route to human emancipation, was Communism,
> which would give people the freedom that bourgeois society denies
> them. Communism is, he explains, "the positive transcendence of
> private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore the
> real appropriation of the human essence by and for man... the
> complete return of man to himself as a social being..." (Economic
> and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)
>
> Innumerable social thinkers disagree with much of Marx's thought,
> but praise his reflections upon human freedom, the depth of his
> insight in contrast to the shallowness of laissez-faire
> liberalism. Yet it is difficult to understand how Marx's concept
> of freedom is anything more than a defense of tyranny and
> oppression. No dissident or non-conformist can see society as the
> "realization of his own liberty." And what can the attack on "the
> right to do everything which does not harm others" amount to in
> practice, except a justification for coercing people who are not
> harming others? The problem with "broad" notions of freedom is
> that they necessarily wind up condoning the violation of "narrow"
> notions of freedom. Under "bourgeois" notions of religious
> liberty, people may practice any religion they wish ("a private
> whim or caprice" as Marx calls it); how could this liberty be
> broadened, without sanctioning the persecution of some religious
> views?
>
> While Marx occasionally says something in favor of democracy,
> Lenin did not originate the doctrine of the dictatorship of the
> proletariat. That was Marx's creation. In his Critique of the
> Gotha Program, Marx explains, "Between capitalist and communist
> society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of
> the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a
> political transition period in which the state can be nothing but
> the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." It is not
> clear how long Marx thought this transitional dictatorship would
> last. As democratic socialist historian Carl Landauer notes:
>
> Gradually, it became evident that the transition from
> capitalism to socialism would take not merely months or
> years but decades, and therefore the extreme left wing
> of the social revolutionists was compelled to take one
> further step. If it was permissible and even necessary
> to throw one's country for so long a period into the
> horrors of civil war and dictatorship, was it then not
> illogical to balk at the use of deceit, torture,
> provocation - in fact of any means that would speed up
> the revolution? Was it not clear that the actions of
> revolutionaries in the transition period should be
> governed only by the law of expediency, and that
> sincerity, mercy, justice toward the individual had as
> little place in the struggle of classes as in the
> jungle? (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and
> Movements)
>
> Marx's thought did not provide the blueprint for Communist
> totalitarianism, but it did provide a rough outline for more
> practical men like Lenin to elaborate upon.
>
> o Socialism and totalitarianism
>
> Marx was a leading figure in a broad socialist tradition. Much of
> this tradition shared his critique of "bourgeois freedom" and
> longed for a world in which the government eliminated both the
> economic and personal freedom of capitalist civilization. Such
> ideas may be found in the works of Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Auguste
> Comte, Ferdinand Lassalle, and many other prominent thinkers.
> Even socialists critical of authoritarianism such as Bernstein
> mainly tried to convince their fellow socialists of the value of
> democracy, showing little appreciation of the danger that
> universal state ownership as such could pose to human freedom, or
> the conflict between freedom and enforced equality.
>
> Communists often deviated from Marxism on small points, but
> almost invariably remained true to the broader authoritarian
> socialist tradition if they could get away with it. Thus, the
> Khmer Rouge reversed Marx's emphasis on the urban industrial
> proletariat, idealizing peasant life so strongly that they
> forcibly deported Cambodia's city dwellers into the country.
> Their inspiration came from other authoritarian socialists, such
> as Rousseau. What varies is what the Communist state forces its
> subjects to do; what is constant is that the Communist state
> recognizes no constraints upon its rule. The variable portion of
> the program usually but not always comes from Marx. The constant
> comes from the critique of "bourgeois freedom" found in the
> broader socialist tradition.
>
> 11. Were Communism and Nazism "morally equivalent" movements?
>
> Both Stalin and Mao's Communist governments indisputably murdered more
> people in cold blood than even Hitler's Nazi regime did. This
> certainly establishes a powerful prima facie case for the proposition
> that Communism and Nazism are "morally equivalent." Once it is granted
> that a regime deliberately murdered millions of innocent people, it is
> difficult to see how any other achievement - the world's best highway
> or the world's biggest dam - could change one's final evaluation.
>
> Probably the most common distinction made between the Communists and
> the Nazis is that the former were misguided idealists, while the later
> were brutal thugs. Alternately, one might argue that the Communists
> ultimately wanted a world where all people would live together in
> harmony, while the Nazis wanted a world where the master race reigned
> supreme over a world purged of inferior races. In short, the
> difference between Communist and Nazis is supposed to be one of
> intentions. Joseph Davies, the pro-Stalin US Ambassador to the USSR,
> gave this point of view its classic expression:
>
> Both Germany and Soviet Russia are totalitarian states. Both
> are realistic. Both are strong and ruthless in their
> methods. There is one distinction, however, and that is as
> clear as black and white. It can be simply illustrated. If
> Marx, Lenin, or Stalin had been firmly grounded in the
> Christian faith, either Catholic or Protestant, and if by
> reason of that fact this communistic experiment in Russia
> had been projected upon this basis, it would probably be
> declared to be one of the greatest efforts of Christian
> altruism in history to translate the ideals of brotherhood
> and charity as preached in the gospel of Christ into a
> government of men... That is the difference - the
> communistic Soviet state could function with the Christian
> religion in its basic purpose to serve the brotherhood of
> man. It would be impossible for the Nazi state to do so. The
> communistic ideal is that the state may evaporate and be no
> longer necessary as man advances into perfect brotherhood.
> The Nazi ideal is the exact opposite - that the state is the
> supreme end of all. (Journal entry, July 7, 1941)
>
> This "argument from intentions" needs to be answered on two levels:
>
> o First, many people are both misguided idealists and brutal thugs.
> They are the "true believers" who join religious crusades, set up
> the Inquisition, exterminate Jews, and liquidate kulaks.
> Brutality alone may lead a movement to set up a police state, but
> why go to the effort of killing millions of people when it
> provides little material gain? It is sadism combined with
> idealistic fervor which animates history's most destructive
> movements. As Solzhenitsyn puts it:
>
> To do evil a human being must first of all believe that
> what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what
> gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives
> the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and
> determination... That was how the agents of the
> Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking
> Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by
> extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the
> colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and
> the Jacobins (early and late), by equality,
> brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
> Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to
> experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the
> millions. (The Gulag Archipelago)
>
> Hitler noted that Communists made excellent converts to Nazism,
> because the same personality type was attracted to both. "[T]here
> is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it.
> There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is
> alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish
> Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and
> given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the
> party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the
> trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the
> Communists always will." (quoted in Hermann Rauschning, Hitler
> Speaks) Stalin also recognized that ex-Nazis and ex- fascists
> were natural recruits for post-war Communist regimes. As Stanley
> Payne notes in his A History of Fascism: 1914-1945, "All over
> Soviet- occupied eastern Europe, most rank-and-file former
> fascist party members, together with many lower-level leaders,
> were welcomed to fill the ranks of the initially exiguous local
> Communist parties. The psychological transition seems to have
> been an easy one, for obvious reasons."
>
> o Second, both the Nazis and the Communists dreamed of universal
> brotherhood - after widescale exterminations of groups
> potentially disruptive to their respective utopias. In addition
> to the former nobility and the bourgeoisie, the Communists also
> generally had an intense disgust for the peasantry - by far the
> largest social class in the early periods of most Communist
> regimes. All of these groups had to be either killed or at least
> have their traditional way of life destroyed. This attitude was
> present among the Bolsheviks from the earliest years of their
> regime. As Zinoviev, a high-ranking Bolshevik put it, "We must
> carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet
> Russia's inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to
> them. They must be annihilated." Just as the Nazis imagined an
> idyllic Germany free of inferior races, the Communists dreamed of
> a harmonious world free of reactionary classes. Both planned to
> reach the uniformity necessary for their utopias by simply
> killing all of the square pegs.
>
> o Further interesting evidence of the moral equivalence of the two
> movements comes during the period of 1939-1941, when Nazi Germany
> and the Soviet Union were in a state of virtual alliance. The
> Molotov-Rippentrop Pact was officially merely a non-aggression
> treaty, but its secret provisions divided up all of eastern
> Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Paul Johnson amusingly recounts
> the diplomatic festivities in the Kremlin:
>
> Ribbentrop reported: "It felt like being among old
> party comrades." He was as much at ease in the Kremlin,
> he added, "as among my old Nazi friends." Stalin
> toasted Hitler and said he "knew how much the German
> people loved the Fuhrer." There were brutal jokes about
> the Anti-Comintern Pact, now dead, which both sides
> agreed had been meant simply to impress the City of
> London and "English shopkeepers." There was the sudden
> discovery of a community of aims, methods, manners,
> and, above all, of morals. As the tipsy killers lurched
> about the room, fumblingly hugging each other, they
> resembled nothing so much as a congregation of rival
> gangsters, who had fought each other before, and might
> do so again, but were essentially in the same racket.
>
> [Image] The Nazis and Soviets applied almost identical internal
> policies to their respective halves of defeated Poland.
> "While the Gestapo organized the persecution of 'racial enemies'
> in German-occupied Poland, the NKVD decrees of 1940 listed
> fourteen categories of people to be deported... Like the SS and
> the Gestapo, the NKVD was engaged, as General Wladyslaw Anders
> later put it, in 'beheading the community' - destroying any
> potential leadership which might organized opposition to Soviet
> rule." (Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside
> Origins of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev) Hitler
> and Stalin even traded dissident emigres: Stalin handed over the
> German Communists in exchange for the Russians and Ukrainians
> residing within Hitler's domain.
>
> o A final distinction often made between the Soviets and the Nazis
> is that the former were "genuine" socialists while the latter
> were fakers. Numerous writers - who generally know next to
> nothing about the Nazi's economic views or policies, but rather
> deduce them from their preconceptions - have argued that Hitler's
> National Socialism was purely verbal. While one always has the
> trivial option to re-define the word "socialism" to make this
> conclusion true, Hitler generally favored and imposed an even
> greater role for government in the German economy than his
> leftist Social-Democratic predecessors. Even the Social-
> Democratic historian Carl Landauer freely admitted this. To
> Landauer's mind, Social Democratic and National Socialist
> economics differed in intentions rather than methods:
>
> In a history of socialism, fascism deserves a place not
> only as the opponent which, for a time, threatened to
> obliterate the socialist movement. Fascism is connected
> with socialism by many crosscurrents, and the two
> movements have some roots in common, especially the
> dissatisfaction with the capitalist economy of the
> pre-1918 type. But another relationship is still more
> significant. Although fascism was ready to use forms of
> economic organization first suggested by the socialists
> - and very likely that use of socialistic forms would
> have increased if fascism had not all but destroyed
> itself in causing the Second World War - the Fascists
> have always repudiated the fundamental humanitarianism
> on which the socialist movement was based. Thus fascism
> permits some conclusions as to the consequences which
> will result from socialist economic policies applied
> without the ethical motivation of socialism.(European
> Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)
>
> Hitler's economic policies extensively increased the regulation
> of foreign trade and agriculture, imposed widespread price
> controls, initiated large public works programs, and copied the
> Soviets' predilection for N-year Plans. As David Schoenbaum
> pointedly remarks in his Hitler's Social Revolution, "A
> generation of Marxist and neo-Marxist mythology notwithstanding,
> probably never in peacetime has an ostensibly capitalist economy
> been directed as non- and even anti-capitalistically as the
> Germany economy between 1933 and 1939." Summing up the situation
> of business under the Nazis, Schoenbaum observes: "Wages, prices,
> working conditions, allocation of materials: none of these were
> left to managerial decision, let alone to the market...
> Investment was controlled, occupational freedom was dead, prices
> were fixed, every major sector of the economy was, at worst, a
> victim, at best, an accomplice of the regime. As a general rule,
> business, particularly big business, declined or flourished in
> direct proportion to its willingness to collaborate."
>
> Admittedly, Hitler did not carry out massive uncompensated
> collectivization as Stalin did. Why not? The reason was strategic
> rather than principled. As Hitler explained to Hermann
> Rauschning:
>
> He [Hitler] had no intention, like Russia, of
> "liquidating" the possessing class. On the contrary, he
> would compel it to contribute by its abilities towards
> the building up of the new order. He could not afford
> to allow Germany to vegetate for years, as Russia had
> done, in famine and misery. Besides, the present owners
> of property would be grateful that their lives had been
> spared. They would be dependent and in a condition of
> permanent fear of worse things to come. (Hermann
> Rauschning, Hitler Speaks)
>
> There is strong evidence that Hitler planned a much more [Image]
> radical economic program after victory in World War II:
> forcible deportation of eastern Europe's peoples, re-colonization
> of the depopulated territory by Germans, establishment of a
> Stalin-style slave labor empire for public works, imposition of
> slavery for inferior races, and so on. Stanley Payne explains
> that Hitler's goals and situation required him to "invert the
> Leninist-Stalinist priority of internal revolution." That is,
> while Lenin and Stalin planned to first impose socialism on the
> Soviet Union, then turn to foreign conquest, Hitler planned to
> make his conquests first, then impose the more radical Nazi
> economic and political policies. "Hitler could only realize his
> ultimate goal of complete racial revolution by foreign conquest,
> and he believed that he enjoyed only a brief window of
> opportunity - scarcely more than a decade - to achieve external
> ascendancy in Europe and to conquer the Lebensraum needed for
> this racial revolution. Hitler therefore sought to develop
> rapidly a functional dictatorship that would enable him to
> concentrate on military expansion in less than a decade. This
> required the thorough subordination of all other elites to such a
> system, but, for the time being, not their complete elimination."
> (A History of Fascism, 1914- 1945)
>
> If the Communists and the Nazis were so similar in their
> propensity for mass murder, their fanaticism, and their economic
> policies, why were their relations so bitter (save during the
> 1939-1941 period)? At the outset, it is unclear why an answer is
> necessary, for there are innumerable examples of bloody conflict
> between people in nearly complete agreement with each other:
> Catholics and Protestants, or Stalinists and Trotskyists, for
> example. In the case of the Nazi-Communist conflict, what
> provoked the Nazi's ire was the internationalism of the Communist
> movement. National Socialists mainly objected to Marxism not for
> its socialism but for its repudiation of nationalism.
> [Image]
>
> 12. Some common objections answered:
>
> A. Aren't you ignoring or defending American human rights
> violations?
>
> Absolutely not, and I frankly find it extremely puzzling that
> anyone would make such an inference. Does a condemnation of Nazi
> genocide indicate an indifference to American atrocities? Surely
> not. History is not a race with a single victor, but a courtroom
> able to try each suspect for his own crime.
>
> Unfair accusations of this kind have dogged the would-be exposers
> of Communist human rights violations at least since 1930's. Thus,
> Eugene Lyons, in his The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of
> America, published in 1941, pointedly observed that:
>
> Certain of my colleagues, having lived in Nazi Germany
> and learned to recognize Hitler's methods, have written
> books exposing the Nazi regime and its intrigues on
> American soil. As far as I am aware they have not been
> reprimanded for not saving the Southern share-croppers
> instead. No book reviewer or liberal commentator has
> sneered at them, "Why must you carry on about
> concentration camps and political murder in Germany?
> What about Sacco and Vanzetti and Negro lynchings?" It
> is assumed, sensibly, that they happen to know more
> about Germany.
>
> But this gracious leeway is denied to writers hostile
> to Stalinist Russia and its foreign conspiratorial
> empire. When they mention millions of corpses in a
> Ukrainian famine, they are told off neatly with a
> scathing reference to the Okies in California. Should
> they allude to the Soviet purges, they are hit over the
> head with Mooney and Billings. Until the Soviet-Nazi
> Pact made the procedure a bit awkward, their indictment
> of terror in Soviet Russia was instantly canceled out
> by reference to Nazi terror in Germany.
>
> There is a grim irony in the mistaken inference that a person
> concerned with Communist atrocities somehow excuses U.S. human
> rights violation. The truth is that the most egregious crimes
> committed by the United States government in this century
> occurred while the United States was in alliance with the Soviet
> Union. Indiscriminate terror bombing of Germany and Japan during
> World War II probably cost several hundred thousand civilian
> lives. Arguably as a result of this alliance, much of Asia and
> eastern Europe came under Communist control. Thus, much of the
> history of Communism indirectly condemns the United States as
> well. A myopic focus on the Cold War era loses sight of the bulk
> of harm the American government has inflicted on the world.
> [Image]
>
> B. What about the oppressive policies of the "White" regimes that
> were often the only alternative to Communism?
>
> In the midst of civil wars, Red and White forces' level of
> indiscriminate killing tends to be roughly proportional to the
> number of people under their control. During the Chinese Civil
> War, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists killed more people than the
> Communists, mainly because they had control of more of the
> country for a longer period. During the Russian Civil War, the
> Whites were outnumbered, so the Communists' killings were not
> surprisingly greater. (It is also worth pointing out that
> frequently Communists, including Lenin, began their revolution
> not against "rightist" Whites but against moderate democratic
> socialists).
>
> When the serious killing starts, and where the important
> differences reveal themselves, is after one side is victorious.
> Communist regimes usually escalate the killing after victory, and
> typically keep it high for one or two generations. White forces
> usually execute and imprison many of their opponents after
> victory, but rarely set up massive slave labor empires or impose
> man-made famines. In consequence they normally murder far fewer
> people in total, as a glance at the list of leading mass
> murdering regimes confirms.
>
> C. Weren't repressive policies forced upon Communist regimes by the
> hostility of the West?
>
> It is difficult to see how this could be so. Did the West force
> Communists to collectivize agriculture, producing mass
> starvation? Or urge them to set up deadly slave labor camps?
> During the Russian Civil War, Allied powers did intervene in
> favor of the Whites, but on an extremely small scale - Britain,
> France, and the United States each lost a few hundred soldiers.
> It is hard to see any connection between this and subsequent
> Soviet policy. Western alliance with Stalin during World War II
> enabled Communism to greatly expand; thus, if anything, the West
> often assisted the spread of repressive policies by Communist
> regimes rather than forcing them to adopt them.
>
> D. Americans have been raised on anti-Communist propaganda. Isn't
> there really a need to balance out this one-sided treatment,
> rather than reinforce it as your Museum does?
>
> To the contrary, an overwhelming majority of Americans know
> nothing about the millions murdered by Communism. They may have
> heard of the 1956 invasion of Hungary, or of Czechoslovakia in
> 1968, or the Berlin Wall, or the Tiananmen Square massacre. They
> may have seen spy movies, or even the Rambo trilogy. But only a
> tiny minority know that Stalin and Mao both killed more people
> than Hitler did. Knowledge of the greatest crimes of the
> 20th-century ought to be universal, or at least a basic
> requirement of culturally literacy. The resurgence of Nazism has
> undoubtedly been curtailed by an energetic educational effort to
> tell the world about Hitler's crimes. It would be a tragedy if
> Communism passed away without burning a single message into
> conscience of the world: "Never again."
>
> No apologies are necessary for the "one-sidedness" of the
> Museum's focus. A movement that deliberately kills millions of
> innocent people can possess only one side.
>
> 13. What are the main resources currently available at the Museum of
> Communism?
>
> There are currently three main exhibits running. The first two discuss
> the origins of Communism in both the Marxist and the Czarist
> traditions. In addition, the Museum has recently opened the first of a
> fifteen part sequence surveying the history of Communism. The exhibit
> currently on display provides an in-depth look at Lenin, his ideas,
> and the consequences of his seizure of power.
>
> 14. What museum expansions are currently being planned?
>
> Parts II-XV of the survey of the history of Communism will appear
> gradually, in sequence. Several new interactive features will soon be
> added, along with some Special Exhibits.
>
> 15. How can I contribute exhibits to the Museum of Communism?
>
> So far, the Museum has been my personal project. But I would very much
> like to receive exhibits relevant to the Museum's mission. Whether you
> would like to write about the effect of Communism upon your life, the
> history of your mother country, or a broader topic, I would very much
> like to hear about it. Write to me at bca...@gmu.edu to tell me about
> your ideas.
>
> 16. Communism is dead or dying all over the world. Given this, does the
> history of Communism retain any practical political implications?
>
> Communism is in serious decline today, but history has a way of
> repeating itself. For this reason alone, it is important for the
> future of the world that the basic facts about Communist regimes
> become common knowledge. While admirers of Hitler's Germany still
> exist, the public knows enough about the Holocaust to make a revival
> of Nazism far less likely than it otherwise would be. Greater
> awareness of the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao could similarly
> inoculate the world against any future Communist revival.
>
> I would also suggest a stronger and more controversial set of
> practical implications:
>
> o Government is at best a necessary evil and at worst an
> intolerable one. Nothing could better confirm the truth of Thomas
> Paine's dictum than the experience of Communism; it is virtually
> a controlled experiment. Remove the checks upon government power,
> and government quickly produces hell on earth. Not only did
> Communism kill millions of people. It created poverty rather than
> plenty, drove human creativity underground, and turned hypocrisy
> into a basic survival skill. This provides a powerful argument
> for viewing all government power with intense skepticism.
>
> o Free markets lead to prosperity and socialism leads to poverty.
> In the real world, all societies have a mixture of free markets
> and socialism; this can make it difficult to figure out which
> institutions lead to prosperity. Communism again provided the
> world with a controlled experiment: Give the government total
> control over the economy, and see what happens. The results were
> typically mass starvation, followed by stagnation. The contrast
> was particularly stark when historical chance split Germany,
> Korea, and China into distinct politico- economic units. The
> culture and initial living standards of the fragments were
> initially the same. As the Communist countries' prosperity lagged
> ever further behind that of their more capitalist counterparts,
> even many skeptics concluded that the difference was not
> coincidental, but systemic.
>
> o The history of Communism provides one important argument for
> libertarianism. Communism deprived its people of both personal
> and economic freedom. It thereby provided a third controlled
> experiment - a moral experiment testing the value of freedom.
> Imagine a society with any conceivable properties, but utterly
> lacking in "bourgeois" freedom. It would remain a profoundly evil
> society. The experience of Communism makes it possible to conduct
> this thought experiment without taxing the imagination.
>
> In American politics, liberals typically argue for more personal
> freedom and less economic freedom, while conservatives argue for
> less personal freedom and more economic freedom. The moral
> controlled experiment which was Communism suggests that both
> popular positions are confused. Each only appreciates half of
> what was wrong about Communism. A political philosophy
> recognizing the supreme value of both personal and economic
> freedom - in a word, libertarianism - provides the clearest
> insight into why Communism was wrong in principle as well as
> practice.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For comments, corrections, or questions about exhibits, write to Bryan
> Caplan at bca...@gmu.edu.
>
Sean Carroll
> I'm interested in the following question but the
>answer appears untrustworthy. Would anyone who feels
>knowledgeable like to critique it or refer me to
>where it has been?
>
<snip>
>> the totalitarian strain in Marx is pronounced. He
>> directs much of his critique against the classical liberal
>> concern for personal freedom and private property - the Rights of
>> Man, or what Marx called "bourgeois freedom."
I'd agree with you that this is untrustworthy. In this opening
paragraph alone the author, whoever he is, shows his loyalty to
bouegois notions of freedom and private property and works from the
assumption that they are correct, without ever stating it outright.
There is no other way he could so easily make the leap from 'Marx
critiqued bourgeois notions of freedom' to 'Marx was a totalitarian'.
>> While Marx occasionally says something in favor of democracy,
>> Lenin did not originate the doctrine of the dictatorship of the
>> proletariat. That was Marx's creation.
Here the author also shows his complete ineptitude in basic Marxist
theory by performing the cardinal error of conflating the Dictatorship
of the Proletariat with totalitarianism. I would have said the same
thing 3 years ago when all I had were second-hand notions of the DotP
fed into me by bourgeois society. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat,
in its most likely historical form, will include such basic democratic
notions as universal suffrage, accountability of the national
government to the local workers' councils, and instant recall of
public officials. Hardly a model of totalitarianism.
>> Communists often deviated from Marxism on small points, but
>> almost invariably remained true to the broader authoritarian
>> socialist tradition if they could get away with it. Thus, the
>> Khmer Rouge
Only someone desperately trying to twist all the evidence to fit his
reactionary view could with a straight face say that because many
dictators claimed loyalty to Marx but did not follow many of his
ideas, that their dictator-ness came directly from Marx. This is not
only not dialectical logic, it's not even competent *formal* logic.
<snip remainder>
I can't even read the rest of this bourgeois liberal propaganda. I
think that's enough of a start for you. It's really not very hard to
critique this document if you know the first thing about Marxism --
which I assume you do or you wouldn't have asked for a critique. Go
back and read some more Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky: they
answered every anti-communist objection raised here before it was
written.
--Sean
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Paracelsus
wrote:
> I'm interested in the following question but the
> answer appears untrustworthy. Would anyone who feels
> knowledgeable like to critique it or refer me to
> where it has been?
>
> > Museum of Communism FAQ
> >...
> > 10. To what extent did Communist totalitarianism derive...
> > From Marx's political and philosophical theories?
Not at all. It actually came from Stalin's measures to both crush
proletariat democracy ( and democracy of any kind ), and consolidate his
own power. Stalin was an unpopular guy; Pretty much the scum of the
earth, with many people who would, with complete justification, remove him
in a second. Thus, he did everything in his power to keep those people
from achieving that, and he even justified sending his opponents in droves
to gullags. Lenin, Trotsky, and Marx were all against anything like these
measures, and did what they thought was neccessary to make Socialism
occur.
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To email me, remove "NOSPAM" from my address.
Paracelsus
> On 26 Jul 2000 22:09:14 GMT, cor...@Hawaii.Edu (Rick Cordes) wrote:
>
> > I'm interested in the following question but the
> >answer appears untrustworthy. Would anyone who feels
> >knowledgeable like to critique it or refer me to
> >where it has been?
> >
> <snip>
> >> the totalitarian strain in Marx is pronounced. He
> >> directs much of his critique against the classical liberal
> >> concern for personal freedom and private property - the Rights of
> >> Man, or what Marx called "bourgeois freedom."
>
> I'd agree with you that this is untrustworthy. In this opening
> paragraph alone the author, whoever he is, shows his loyalty to
> bouegois notions of freedom and private property and works from the
> assumption that they are correct, without ever stating it outright.
> There is no other way he could so easily make the leap from 'Marx
> critiqued bourgeois notions of freedom' to 'Marx was a totalitarian'.
>
> >> While Marx occasionally says something in favor of democracy,
> >> Lenin did not originate the doctrine of the dictatorship of the
> >> proletariat. That was Marx's creation.
>
> Here the author also shows his complete ineptitude in basic Marxist
> theory by performing the cardinal error of conflating the Dictatorship
> of the Proletariat with totalitarianism. I would have said the same
> thing 3 years ago when all I had were second-hand notions of the DotP
> fed into me by bourgeois society. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat,
> in its most likely historical form, will include such basic democratic
> notions as universal suffrage, accountability of the national
> government to the local workers' councils, and instant recall of
> public officials. Hardly a model of totalitarianism.
>
> >> Communists often deviated from Marxism on small points, but
> >> almost invariably remained true to the broader authoritarian
> >> socialist tradition if they could get away with it. Thus, the
> >> Khmer Rouge
>
> Only someone desperately trying to twist all the evidence to fit his
> reactionary view could with a straight face say that because many
> dictators claimed loyalty to Marx but did not follow many of his
> ideas, that their dictator-ness came directly from Marx. This is not
> only not dialectical logic, it's not even competent *formal* logic.
>
> <snip remainder>
>
> I can't even read the rest of this bourgeois liberal propaganda. I
> think that's enough of a start for you. It's really not very hard to
> critique this document if you know the first thing about Marxism --
> which I assume you do or you wouldn't have asked for a critique. Go
> back and read some more Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky: they
> answered every anti-communist objection raised here before it was
> written.
>
The best books to read would be Marx's "The Communist Manifesto", Lenin's
"The State and Revolution", and Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed" to
understand what's going on, IMHO.
> --Sean
>
>
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