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Originally posted by Tuomerehu
I'm a bit late here, but...
I've always defined socialism a system where the goverment, a dictator and his/her small cabinet, have a maximum control of it's people to ensure the efficiency and "justice for all" (Hitler, Kruschsev, Castro, Hussein), while communism is a system where people are the goverment. Am I wrong?
I'm a bit late here, but...
I've always defined socialism a system where the goverment, a dictator and his/her small cabinet, have a maximum control of it's people to ensure the efficiency and "justice for all" (Hitler, Kruschsev, Castro, Hussein), while communism is a system where people are the goverment. Am I wrong?
The only explicitly socialist revolution not to become dictatorial was the Nicaraguan one (unless your idea of what free elections are is only what the US government tells you).
When Marx wrote about the dictatorship of the proletariat, he meant the absolute rule of the protletariet, not a personal or party dictatorship. To put it another way, we, in the Western democracies, live in dictatorships of the bourgeoisie. They rule, the state is run in their interests. Different states may disagree about the best way to maximize those interests. Keynesianism says, "Buy off the working class to keep it from revolting." American "free-market" ideology is to make workers think that they might one day become part of the ruling class, and if they get too uppity in the mean-time, beat the crap out of them. Still other countries just go for beating the crap outta the working class to make sure it knows its place.
To Comrade Frankychan, I would note that I do not believe there is a parlimentary road to socialism. Were we to take control of the government via electoral means, the state itself would organize to defeat us. That's it's job, to defend the existing class order. Either they would sabotage our efforts to bring about peaceful economic change or they would launch a coup d'etat. This is the history of every single actual attempt to bring about socialism via the parliament (by which I do not mean the social-democracies of Europe, which are not socialist).
This is why we need a revolution. The capitalists' state must be broken; it's ability to thwart the will of the people destroyed. It doesn't have to be a violent revolution. The Bolshevik revolution wasn't violent. It was the counter-revolution that was violent, the old state's attempt to assert the political and economic supremacy of the capitalists and aristocrats.
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