Commie says hi!

[Red Economist]

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.

there is a long history of hair-brained utopian experiments and communities in the 19th century. Robert Owen is probably the most notable because he was (I think) pretty much the founder of the co-operative movement. As a political movement, Communism was on a completely different scale.

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.

Yeah; the relationship between Science, Philosophy and Politics is problematic. The idea that Marxism was a 'worldview' encompassing both natural and social sciences was something specific to Russian Marxism (Plekanhov I think). It's a logical position, but throws up some real issues as it means the philosophy/politics takes precedence over the evidence and therefore places ideological restriction on science. Western Forms of Marxism (such as the Frankfurt school) didn't have this position and kept Marxism in the social sciences. The Russian Variant becomes part of the Leninist model and then spread across the world in Marxist-Leninist philosophy. There is an excellent book (Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars) which deals with the Party's interventions into Scientific matters in the early 50's. what a mess! I think China still has these issues as Maoism shares the same ideas but they've receded from the days of the cultural revolution era.

If you're interested, I recently found this on the internet; it makes some fascinating reading about Soviet Physics and the problems with the origin of the universe (there is a brief mention of China at the end);
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1204/1204.1625.pdf

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...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.

...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.

it is a real headache. Whatever I might think about Stalin, I can recognize that this was someone with serious political ability, and the ruthlessness to get what he wanted done. The idea on 'limits to power' run contrary to the communist conception of "freedom" which easily equates with maximizing the power of the state in it's less subtle readings of the theory. the cruder Marxism is as a theory, the more destructive it is as revolution is supposed to be a simultaneously process of creation and destruction, as the 'workers state' is also supposed to be simultaneously dictatorial and democratic depending on which class you belong to.