RE: What is your opinion about Communism?
November 23, 2017 at 12:16 pm
(This post was last modified: November 23, 2017 at 12:23 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(November 23, 2017 at 10:44 am)Catholic_Lady Wrote: I don't think there's any denying that Democracy is obviously much better than communism, come on...
Communism is an economic system. Democracy is a governance structure.
Furthermore, communism can have different meanings.
The classical communism as espoused by Karl Marx was envisioned by Marx to require a full democracy that is sufficiently educated and informed as to function properly. Implicitly “class enemies” are done away with. It was also envisioned to be something that could only be attained in a highly industrialized, universally highly educated society with a large surplus of productive capacity and resources to facilitate an extremely wealthy socialism, perhaps a radical version of Nordic socialism seen in Scandinavian countries.
What you think of as communism is Leninism. Leninism professes to pursue Marxist communism as the goal, but repudiates much of the prerequisites and practices explicitly spelled out by Marx. This was model adopted by the Soviet Union and followed to the end, adopted by China but them largely abandoned in practice following the death of Mao, and adopted by North Korea, still followed in practice but repudiated in theory by Kim following the fall of USSR in the 1990s. Lenin believed the end goal Marx envisioned can be forced upon poor, underdeveloped societies by a cadre of enlightened by ruthless dictators such as, not surprisingly, himself.