"Communism sounds great on paper - it just doesn't work in reality!" = most tedious line of conversation EVER?

I never understood the part about it looking great on paper, to be honest.

Buy a leather bound set of Das Kapital, it looks great on your shelves.

communism fails because different humans in seemingly similar circumstances will NECESSARILY want and believe radically different blablaba.

― having taken an actual journalism class (contenderizer), Saturday, September 25, 2010 2:57 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark

always the most shameful posts, those born of late night drunkenness and SERIUS THOTS

Came across this thread today. Check out commissar17 - not just a Stalin apologist but a big fan of the Taliban, Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong Il. I didn't know people like this even existed anymore.

http://www.stroudgreen.org/discussion/2271/communists-in-stroud-green/#Item_0

I draw your attention to an excellent pamphlet entitled 'Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union' (available via the Stalin Society website).

my stepfather was a Stalin apologist. it was pretty bracing to actually learn the extent of Stalin's terror after growing up hearing about Comrade S.'s anti-nazi bona fides.

Robert Conquest published this photo in his Stalin bio. I love his caption:

http://visualrian.com/storage/PreviewWM/0047/44/4744.jpg?1259917735

"The next day, Stalin had her father shot"

not a Stalin apologist, but I may have posed as one in conversation before to troll well-meaning liberal anti-communists. in general, though, I don't like talking about dude unless the terms of the debate have been clearly established, or it's just too easy to end up shouting and talking past each other.

a friend of mine once got marked down on a history exam for writing something along the lines of "historians disagree on the extent to which Stalin's economic policies were directly responsible for the famines of 1932-3"; the T.A., apparently missing the irony, circled that sentence and wrote "I don't think they do"

The next day, the T.A. had his father shot.

"I got 40 commies up in here now who kill commies' fathers" - J. Stalin

a big fan of the Taliban, Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong Il. I didn't know people like this even existed anymore.

erm

You must be reading a different Comment Is Free to me. The one I read is full of right-wing trolls and bored cynics.

xpost to aerosmith. Wow. Obviously US communists ignored, forgave or were honestly ignorant of a lot while Stalin was alive but after Khrushchev's denunciation I imagine your stepfather was in a very very small minority.

but I may have posed as one in conversation before to troll well-meaning liberal anti-communists.

Why?

i'm pretty left wing but i think communism looks pretty terrible even on paper.

i know they're not commies, but how bout those semi-socialist germans kicking everyone else's ass financially? go proles!

You must be reading a different Comment Is Free to me. The one I read is full of right-wing trolls and bored cynics.

this one?

guys guys ILX commune is the only way out of this

Came across this thread today. Check out commissar17 - not just a Stalin apologist but a big fan of the Taliban, Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong Il. I didn't know people like this even existed anymore.

http://www.stroudgreen.org/discussion/2271/communists-in-stroud-green/#Item_0

― The baby boomers have defined everything once and for all (Dorianlynskey), Sunday, 17 October 2010 12:15 (10 hours ago) Bookmark

I'm happy to talk to you (or, indeed, anyone else) about our position regarding the DPRK and Zimbabwe. In the first case, that of North Korea, we recognize it for what it is -- a socialist country which has eliminated the exploitation of man by man and, in case it escaped anybody's attention, the first country to fight U$ imperialism to a humiliating standstill.

Obviously US communists ignored, forgave or were honestly ignorant of a lot while Stalin was alive but after Khrushchev's denunciation I imagine your stepfather was in a very very small minority.

― The baby boomers have defined everything once and for all (Dorianlynskey), Sunday, October 17, 2010 10:24 PM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark

people kept on making excuses way after that. in france 1956 didn't change much: a bigger watershed was the publication of the 'gulag archipelago' two decades later. and a lot of people just get round the problem -- i think i used to, a bit -- by saying it was all stalin's doing or w/e.

what do you mean by "in france 1956 didn't change much"? legitimately confused here.

i think that he was talking about the mindset of French Communists, not that nothing in France itself had changed much in the twenty years after 1956.

yep. obviously there were little modifications, recondite philosophical tinkerings. and you have to come to grips with what maoism meant to mean to french intellectuals in the 60s/early 70s -- probably not a celebration of unnecessary famine, mass murder, work camps, but idk. but from what i've read anyway it was the mid-70s and 'the gulag archipelago' that really tore them away from totalitarian communism; hence the attacks on grand narratives, etc.

french communism is the biggest joke the french ever played on humanity

communist humanism is the biggest joke the communists ever played on frogmanity.

humanist franglicism is the biggest joke the humans ever played on community.

otoh, french humans are the biggest joke the french ever played on same.

xpost to history mayne - I meant Stalin specifically, not communism in general. The 60s and 70s hard left approved of Mao, Ho Chi Minh, etc but I haven't read any examples of them defending Stalin by that stage.

me neither: but condemning "the stalinist deviation" was a way of continuing to approve of, or not really come to grips with, the soviet system. it's an ironic reflection of the personality cult and "bourgeois" great man history, in a way. plenty of french intellectuals (not to mention voters) stayed loyal to moscow not only after 1956, but also after 1968.

from what i've read anyway it was the mid-70s and 'the gulag archipelago' that really tore them away from totalitarian communism; hence the attacks on grand narratives, etc.

― ENRRQ (history mayne), Monday, October 18, 2010 8:30 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

for me the specificity of the French situation comes from, on the one hand, a historically strong labor movement, which was becoming more radicalized again post-WWII as the Socialists took a lot of shit for their pacifism and the Communists won prestige from the Resistance; and on the other hand, the intellectuals within and without the PCF who saw toeing the party line as something of a Faustian bargain, and never really stopped trying to find ways to distance themselves from Moscow, even as they strongly opposed US imperialism internationally and supported the French working-class at home.

in conclusion: yeah, I really don't think that yr average working-class Parisian PCF voter cared all that much about what was going on in the USSR

yeah althusser is what i mean by still believing in the one-party state, labour camps, occupation of eastern europe etc -- but being 'anti-stalinist' via these philosophical dickerings. as if the official doctrine of the ussr 192_–53 was the root of the problem.

i should allow that some french bros disavowed 'stalinism' after '56, but for most laypeople that isn't a matter of historical determinism or what have you but unbridled state power, imperialism, show trials, forced famines and the like. not sure the french left got their arms round that set of problems (other than by embracing, um, mao).

Communism sounded better on vinyl.

or

Communism sounds great on DVD Audio.

'anti-stalinist' via these philosophical dickerings

that's a p mealy-mouthed attack on the ussr, isn't it? 'oh man, how could they think that? if only they had believed in relative autonomy, they would never have put all those people in labour camps.'

idk, would censure or expulsion from the communist party really be such dishonourable things? i think not, but im soft like that.

jameson voluntarily submits to the idea of marxism as a "philosophical horizon" or somesuch thing -- in other words, he's a theological marxist. he would have prospered under any system of government, i think, but was fortunate to be born somewhere where the stakes of this kind of nonsense are so low.

I'm not saying Althusser was a great polemicist or an inspiring public intellectual or anything, but I do think he was a serious and independent thinker who believed there was something valuable in Marx and wanted to work out (for himself and for anyone else who cared) what exactly it was, and in the process he criticized a lot of lazy unphilosophical thinking. there's a part from the end of his essay "Marxism and Humanism" where he calls out the infinitely-more-mealy-mouthed idea of the "cult of personality", saying basically: this is not a theory, it's the absence of a theory, which you have hastily attempted to plug up using the first ideas you laid your hands on.

I don't really know what to say about Jameson; it seems like you just don't like the dude, which is fine. but I think it's funny that you bring up the issue of birthplace, because Jameson's steeze has always struck me as distinctly rooted in his Americanness. maybe that's why Europeans have always been skeptical of the whole "postmodernism" thing, while contemporary Chinese academics apparently love it: on some level, you "just have to be there", "there" being a flattened out non-place where 'planned communities', 'housing developments', and 'shopping centers' sprout seemingly overnight from the brows of architects and planners.

you can't claim althusser was an 'independent' thinker and say that he needed to use double-talk so's to stay on the right side of the party. it's one or the other. of course there is something valuable in marx, but he isn't the last word, and nor is any interpretation of marx going to be. there isn't going to be a last word, i suppose is what im saying -- and that's an impossible thing for a party intellectual to say. (but i don't think what he found was what was valuable -- im history mayne not philosophy mayne tho. and marx is more historian than philosopher.)

there's nothing mealy-mouthed about the idea of the personality cult. it isn't a theory: indeed. it's just a facet of the soviet union, part of that history. wasn't making a big thing out of it -- it's hardly the worst thing, or the decisive thing. im not looking for a 'theory' to explain the ussr though.

you can't claim althusser was an 'independent' thinker and say that he needed to use double-talk so's to stay on the right side of the party.

and like, I actually agree with you about this:

condemning "the stalinist deviation" was a way of continuing to approve of, or not really come to grips with, the soviet system. it's an ironic reflection of the personality cult and "bourgeois" great man history

What was wrong with 20th-century Communism was not its resort to violence per se—the seizure of state power, the Civil War to maintain it—but the larger mode of functioning, which made this kind of resort to violence inevitable and legitimized: the Party as the instrument of historical necessity, and so on.

http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2853

zizek, advocating revolutionary violence

it's all fun and games until millions of people (workers included) are killed

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/lscott/2011/08/02/could-mila-kunis-be-a-sing-of-hope-and-change/

this is a several hundred-word blog post on "big hollywood" speculating about whether or not mila kunis is a "Randian Libertarian" because she said friends with benefits arrangements are "like communism — good in theory, in execution it fails"

sorta surprising there aren't more libertarians in hollywood

"big hollywood" blogger leigh scott describes mila kunis' choice to compare friends with benefits relationships with communism as "brave"

hmm....russian emigre to America...got work in Hollywood...if the shoe fits...

there is some kind of mila rennaissance on that side of the aisle because she said yes to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0om2ApQPvq

I do think libertarianism is on the rise in Hollywood. I recently produced a film starring the mighty James Woods. The average age on the crew was about 27. On set I overheard a female crew person mumbling about how she saw Woods on Fox News and that he had become a “crazy conservative.” A male crew member, cigarette in mouth, calmly looked at her and replied “he’s not crazy, he’s right”. I didn’t have to say a word.

Hope and change indeed.

what is this, do you think

what video is that, it doesnt work for me

I was gonna photoshop ayn rand in a that 70s show graphic but I got too lazy

"It’s no coincidence that people who demonstrate above average intelligence in the real world trend conservative. And I’m not talking about academic background. I’m talking about street smarts, savvy, and rich personal experiences. Smart people don’t walk around all the time explaining how smart they are. Ever notice how progressives are always going on about “intellectualism” and trying to impress you with big words for obviously idiotic things?"

Well this paragraph basically tells you everything you might need to know about the insecurities driving author Leigh Scott's life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0om2ApQPvqI

hmm dunno what the prob is

http://youtu.be/0om2ApQPvqI

oh right

haha well if THE TROOPS are involved she MUST be a randian libertarian

so ignoring the last four thousand posts i really agree with OP! it has nothing to do with the politics of it. there's just no situation where you can say that line and have it add to any discussion, because by the age of 12 everyone has heard it ~a billion times. and everyone always says it as if they're the first to! i hate it.

anyway back to your scheduled mila kunis etc