Welcome Red!

I look forward to hearing something other than liberal/conservative rhetoric.  We may not agree on everything but I bet we are closer than I think right now 

I definitely have a little communist in me that sometimes wants out. I'm just a bit put off by the perceived dogmatism. When I was in NY a friend took me to a local campus communist meeting, and it was pretty interesting, but I had the feeling that certain things were not discussed and simply held as truths. I think the topic back than was what one should do in Iraq.

(April 23, 2015 at 4:00 am)Red Economist Wrote: I'm currently active on ReligiousForums.com and ...

Howdy. Or should I say jj.tj "be come." We probably have three forums in common though I quit using ReligiousForums.com and RevLeft. Nothing against them. The former is just too "loud" and the latter too invested in political ideology unlikely to fly in the USA and which I only partly concur with. I'll probably quit this one soon as well, when I get bored of it.    

Do enjoy.

(April 23, 2015 at 4:00 am)Red Economist Wrote: Greetings Atheist Forums,

I'm currently active on ReligiousForums.com and thought I might get involved here to be around more of my fellow atheists. I am a strong atheist, but currently thinking over how I can establish that as true and what it's implications would be. I am a communist in that I accept Marxist philosophy of nature (dialectical materialism) and society (historical materialism). There aren't many Communists left, so I'm ok with disagreeing with people and respecting others views so long as it's relatively civil.

I will save some time by saying that I am not an apologist for Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot etc and a great deal of my time is spent trying to understand why they did what they did and how far it was an inherent characteristic of the system/ideology as a way to find out if it could have been done better. I am familiar to many anti-communist criticisms (and have read F. Hayek's Road to Serfdom from cover to cover) and whilst they often true to a greater or lesser extent, they are often very simplistic and rely on specific political/philosophical assumptions which I don't share as a Marxist. As such I am not an orthodox Marxist, but share enough in common with those who went before to call myself a 'commie'.

I look forward to debating everyone here and learning things from you.

regards,
Red.

I know you! Yay, you've joined here! Welcome  

Welcome to the forum.

(April 23, 2015 at 9:43 am)Red Economist Wrote:

(April 23, 2015 at 4:56 am)pocaracas Wrote: Welcome Red!
I think all those communist regimes failed because of the human element in them.... how can you remove that from any form of government is beyond me, so we're left with this crappy liberalism/capitalism, tempered by some weak socialism that can be found throughout Western Europe... seems to get the job done, even if it consistently deteriorates the people's ability to live comfortably... Then you get a revolution and it all starts over... some lose a lot of money, others gain... most improve a bit only to then start the declining road all over again.

The "human element" in a system of government is the belief that people are inherently selfish and therefore tend towards political corruption in a communist society.

Actually, you'll find that sentence works even if you take the "communist" word out.

(April 23, 2015 at 9:43 am)Red Economist Wrote: At it's most basic, the idea of "human nature" is equivalent to the "soul" and therefore has deeply theological roots; the selfishness of man in liberal politics is partly derived from the idea of original sin in Christianity and the belief that the pursuit of pleasure is immoral/sinful.

errmmm... yeah... sort of...

(April 23, 2015 at 9:43 am)Red Economist Wrote: mankind worst kept secret is that power is exhilarating, enjoyable and a major-turn on, so for my part I've borrowed ideas from Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm (both Freudo-Marxists) to look at the psychology involved as Marxism itself doesn't have a clear statement of the problem or it's solution.

I don't think it's a solvable problem, so no political approach is perfect.

(April 23, 2015 at 9:43 am)Red Economist Wrote: Trying to show that the soul, and therefore it's distant intellectual cousin, 'human nature', doesn't exist is hard. It is however possible to argue that they are an illusion, in so far as it is assumed that this 'nature', the essence of man is supposed to be fixed irrespective of the time and place people live. individuals change and develop over their lifetime, and society's clearly evolve in their moral understanding. the conundrum is "revolutions" which are massive leaps in moral understanding and social development. I'm confident there is an answer, but I'm not 100% confident of what it is. Wilhelm Reich argued that Fascism was the product of the repression of healthy sexuality and it then being sublimated into sado-masochistic sexual perversions. I think the same rationale can be at work behind explaining communism's capacity for violence, irrationality and corruption. that's my best guess so far.

I think a communist style organization can work well enough at small scales... cooperatives, clubs... town hall, at most. Take it to the country level and... everyone becomes a pig.

(April 23, 2015 at 9:43 am)Red Economist Wrote: The Soviet Union had some real problems trying to work out a consistently atheist/materialist view of nature and it meant that science became highly politicized. From a historical point of view, it's fascinating, but- if I actually had a better knowledge of the scientific concepts- is also intriguing because it conflicts with current ideas regarding the big bang, genetics, quantum mechanics and in some ways evolution.

Indeed. As soon as a political movement thinks it can have a say about the findings of science, all red flags go up. I honestly think that this is the first step on the way to catastrophe, an Orwellian denial of reality. Lysenko is of course a drastic example, but there are more subtle ones, where the soviets tried to tell physicists that relativity or quantum mechanics or what have you are not compatible with whatever ideology they currently embraced, because of some hare brained ideas about how political principles should be reflected in the laws of the universe.

(April 23, 2015 at 4:08 am)robvalue Wrote: ...The concept of God is not well defined...

I'll buy that. Every time we use that word we have no idea what we really mean by it.

(April 23, 2015 at 9:43 am)Red Economist Wrote: ...being a Stalinist has the advantage of sticking with more orthodox ideas and learning the history and also having be honest enough about the mistakes that were made...that people are inherently selfish and therefore...political corruption in a communist society...explaining communism's capacity for violence, irrationality and corruption.

So that Khruschev and his successors remained Stalinists after the 20th Party Congress. But I wonder if they got over Russia's  propensity for violence and corruption, much less communism's? Somehow I don't feel they were ever able to solve the problem of establishing a governance tradition for that country. Selfishness and its irrational sequelae of course occur everywhere but it seems that the Soviet Union was overly dependent on personal relationships for getting things done, as Russia still is now. The worst thing about Stalin is they had no way of curbing this guy or showing him the door before he could do his dirty deeds. Stalin outmaneuvered rivals and built a patronage network around himself that became impenetrable.

Nixon tried to a lesser extent to do that here, but was doomed from the start. Even without Watergate, he would have been gone in 1977 anyway. That 8-year time limit, plus the fact that all the U.S. power players support and enforce it, is important. We could have a Bush/Gore thing but we didn't have a Bush-for-life. Often I think the communist way might have succeeded if they had been able to introduce effective limits on personal power and patronage, a goal they were starting to push toward at the end but when it was already too late for them.