Imagine a comedy series where Marx actually meets people like Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao and reacts to how they interpreted his ideas. It'd be so peak. "Pol Pot what the fuck? Where did I write the words killing fields? WHERE?!"
Fun (?) fact: Pol Pot probably never even really read Marx. Khmer Rouge ideology was a mix of Chinese maoism, French revolution and native Khmer history (slavery and great projects of Angkor Empire).
Liquidation the way Marx wrote it meant dissolution or clearance. The Bolsheviks, inspired by the Jacobins Revolutionaries, made it into a Terror thingy, where they slaughtered their opponents wholesale. Stalin used that word as a euphemism for mass murder, and it kept that meaning since.
BTW, in Mein Kampf, Hitler didn't use allegories or stay vague on the matter:
Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example, as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.
While Marx doesn't describe killing grounds specifically, he calls for a violent revolution in which entire classes of people will be "liquidated".
And if we want to compare Hitler and Marx, then we can:
We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.
In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
So he wants all the people responsible for Capitalism to be "liquidated" and believes the Jews are responsible for Capitalism. Do you see where this goes?
Edit: As for the "liquidation doesn't mean killing" line, that defence didn't work at Nuremberg.
I understand what you mean. I'm telling you that it's a bad interpretation based on shaky associations. I think you read neither Marx or Hitler and you jump to conclusions based on quotes you picked from the internet.
Marx called religion the opium of the people and was highly critical of all faiths, including his own. Yeah, he was Jewish. He also called the US Civil War an example of revolutions and called Lincoln a real Communist.
As for the "liquidation doesn't mean killing" line, that defence didn't work at Nuremberg.
What are you talking about? This doesn't even make sense.
An attempt was made by one of the defendants at Nuremberg (Kaltenbrunner, if I recall correctly) to argue that the various euphamisms used for the Holocaust, e.g. "liquidation" didn't mean killing. It didn't work. My point is that attempting to sanitise the calls for mass murder inherent in Marx's writings are approximately as plausible as that defence, and are indeed identical to it.
Marx is explicitly not referring to religion in that essay (emphasis mine):
Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.
He was talking about dissolving the Jews as a people, through violence (Marx did not envision anything but a highly violent revolution). There had been a number of attempts to dissolve entire peoples through violence by that point. There is a word for it today: Genocide.
I have read enough of Marx at university to see through his bullshit. I think you haven't read Marx at all, and moving to the "just read theory, bro" defence is a sign you haven't got an answer for the awful shit he believed, yet are still trying to defend him.
Marx is, in fact, referring to religion in the segment you quoted and is part of a wider discourse on general discrimination against Jews in Christian states. An exerpt from the paragraph before the one you posted reads:
[...] For us, the question of the Jew’s capacity for emancipation becomes the question: What particular social element has to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism?[...]
Similarly the paragraph following reads:
Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.
An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society.[...]
Is it antisemitic? Yes. Does he advocate for the extermination of the Jewish people? No.
Marx argues that under communism there would be no need for huckstering or money, and as a result, it would be impossible "to be a jew." Is the foundation of his analysis antisemitic? Once again, yes. Marx was antisemitic, most people were at the time, and Germans especially so. Was he more antisemitic that your average German? Maybe? Is he arguing for Jews to be publicly hung and left to rot? NO!
I think you should brush up on the Marx you read at university because you have missed the mark by quite the margin here.
He is arguing for the Jews to cease to be, through a violent revolution.
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. show us what happens when Marx's plans on groups ceasing to be don't happen by themselves.
Marx's theories are the direct inspiration for those mass killings, whether you like it or not.
Edit: Also, he isn't talking about the Jews as a religious group, or their religion. He is talking about them as a minority group at all. That's what he means by the "emancipation of humanity" bit, he wants all distinctions and all groups to be subsumed into class consciousness only.
So anyone who identifies as anything but their class is a problem for Marx.
Marx believed that violence was the only way that problems could or should be solved. He was explicitly opposed to things like the SPD because they called for reform via the ballot box.
So we have minorities being a problem, and violence being the way that Marx called for problems to be solved. Where do you think this is going to end up?
You are just repeating the statement you made earlier.
If you by "arguing for the Jews to cease to be, through a violent revolution" mean "arguing for a revolution that abolishes private property and money, leading to the foundation for being Jewish (which in his eyes is money and huckstering) to disappear, leading to the disappearance of spiritual and secular jewishness" then yes, I suppose you are somewhat correct.
In regards to the" emancipation of the world from Judaism" bit, if you had bothered to read further, you would find the following:
[...] The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.[...]
[...]Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.
The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.
Marx argues that the Judaism and money are inseparable and the "emancipation of the world from Judaism" is to be more akin to the "emancipation of the world from a society centered around money."
Unless you also intend to portray it as if he wishes to exterminate the Christians as well since they "have become jews." /s
Now, I cannot speak for Marx, but his close collaborator and editor Engels had some words about the "peaceful abolition of private property" found in "The principles of Communism" section 16:
It would be desirable if this could happen, and the communists would certainly be the last to oppose it. Communists know only too well that all conspiracies are not only useless, but even harmful. They know all too well that revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily, but that, everywhere and always, they have been the necessary consequence of conditions which were wholly independent of the will and direction of individual parties and entire classes.
Edit: As far as minorities and class consciousness goes, his views were that the primary division between people was class, not religion or race, etc. The primary reason being that the ruling class, I.e. the bourgeoisie were and are using things like race and religion to divide the proletariat and distract them for furthering their own interest. You don't care that the factory owner makes an order of magnitude more than you because you are too busy worrying about immigrants coming in and stealing the work, when in reality it is in both your and the immigrant's interest to seize the means of production and divide the money between you. It is after all, you who do all the work, while the factory owner just owns the tools and machinery that the work is being performed with. Alternatively, the media and politicians are telling you to worry about trans people and immigrants, funneling your anger and outrage towards them instead of the people siphoning off value from the work you do etc.
I mean, he is pretty clear that he considers religion to be a bad thing that should be gotten rid of, so yes, he also wants to get rid of Christians through violence. That's implicit in his worldview.
Also, his violent revolution isn't intended to "divide the money" between the workers, it is intended to create a society that produces "the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor".
The idea is to force everyone to be good proletarians, and nothing else, indeed, in Critique of the Gotha Programme, he largely endorses the idea of a world where "everyone is only a worker like everyone else" (emphasis mine), as a necessary precondition of his "higher phase of communist society": "only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
The end goal is a classless, moneyless society, accomplished by forcing everyone to join the class he liked, and give the state all of the money. An interpretation in which he doesn't endorse a totalitarian state that uses violence to achieve these ends requires a view of Marx that is so incapable of following the logic of his argument as to be mentally disabled. That would be uncharitable compared to simply accepting he was supportive of violence and totalitarianism.
He didn't want people to live as they willed, they were to live as he willed they should.
You say that as if even half the people killed by Pol Pot, Stalin, or Mao were bourgeoisie the reasons they're considered monsters is they kinda didn't stop after the revolution had infact destroyed their countries bourgeoisie.
No, I would say the reason they were (not considered, they just were) monsters was that they murdered millions of people.
They were also of the view that the people they were murdering were the bourgeoisie. Own the land you farm? Bourgeoisie. Own 2 pairs of shoes? Bourgeoisie. Own glasses? You better believe, bourgeoisie.
If you are saying they were only bad for murdering the wrong people, you are on par with Netanyahu saying Hitler was only bad because he targeted the Jews rather than Muslims.
Destroy the bourgeoisie is subject to interruption. Arguably after you have confiscated property from all classes you have infact achieved Marx's liquidation. During the communist revolution in China,Russia, and Cambodia they infact achieved this after the collapse of the various systems that proceeded them. In otherwords along specifically Marx's definition there were infact no Bourgeoisie because private property had been confiscated by the state. Yet Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin quickly learned all Autocracy work pretty much the same way. So they began purges to instill fear in the population. Marx's envisioned revolution was quickly abandoned do to well human nature. Stalin would even nake moves directly contradicting the global communist movement to serve his own self interest in any given moment. What Pol Pot defines as bourgeoisie does not matter to my main point because it directly contradicts with Marx's own definition of the term showing a divergence in the term and is the classic Autocratic move to take advantage of low literacy rates and rewrite the ideology for what yoy need to maintain control.
But it's true. No one has ever followed Marx to the letter as far as I know. Like yes, it is still communism, but not communism as envisioned by Marx. It's like what Mormonism is to the Catholic Church, both descended from the same ideas with differing execution.
I think the main problem was that they lacked the knowledge of statesmanship.
Here are a few passages from The Hungry Steppe, by Sarah Cameron (2018) (published by Cornell).
It talks about how the soviets killed the entire economy of central asia, a primarily livestock economy. 90% of the livestock was lost, lead to famine and refugees.
That's what happens when you make a peasant into a king.
Like, it was the same deal with the communist romanian leader (Ceausescu). He only finished primary school (his wife too), and is responsible for killing the romanian economy by taxing the people and focusing on paying off foreign debt, rather than growing the economy. It's like, communists have an allergy for intelligentsia.
Though Moscow sought to make Kazakhstan into a meatpacking center to rival Chicago, the regime’s radical program of state-led transformation actually sparked the total collapse of the republic’s livestock economy. By the fall of 1933, over 90 percent of the animals in the republic had perished, a striking turn of events for what had been the Soviet Union’s most important livestock base.
In Kazakhstan, 1928 was known as the year of the Little October. That fall, the party launched the bai confiscation campaign, a program to appropriate livestock and property from “wealthy” Kazakh elites who were supposedly exploiting their kin members. The campaign targeted seven hundred of the richest and most influential bais.
Bringing their herds—in 1928, the total number of livestock in the republic was estimated at 37.5 million, the most of any Soviet republic—into the collective farm system was a massive undertaking, requiring the construction of winter stables, the provisioning of water and fodder (a particularly challenging prospect in arid regions, where few water sources and little suitable land for growing hay or other fodder could be found), and the inoculation of animals unaccustomed to living in close quarters against various diseases
Livestock numbers began a precipitous decline in 1930. In 1931, an investigation by VTsIK secretary Aleksei Kiselev found that the republic had lost more than 70 percent of the livestock it had in 1929.
In March 1930, Goloshchekin had pleaded with Stalin for a reduction in the republic’s meat procurements. He argued that fulfilling these procurements would mean the slaughter of some 30–35 percent of the republic’s herds, endangering future sowings (without livestock the fields could not be plowed) as well as the growth of the herd.
But by July 1930, the secretary of the Central Committee, Pavel Postyshev, warned that the supply of meat to Moscow had nearly collapsed. He ordered that the pressure on Kazakhstan and other regions that supplied the city with meat be intensified. Kazakhstan soon became the major meat supplier to both Moscow and Leningrad. In the last three months of 1931, as the republic’s herds dwindled to just 30 percent of their 1929 levels, the republic was slated to deliver 59,500 tons of meat to Moscow and Leningrad, more than twice that of any other region or republic.
After touring two majority nomadic regions, Kazakhstan and Kirgizia, in January 1931, Anastas Mikoian, the people’s commissar for external and internal trade, concluded in a cable to the Central Committee, “In reality, there is a tremendous quantity of unaccounted livestock.”
They authorized mass campaigns to find livestock that had been “hidden” or “driven into the mountains and deserts,” and they promised rewards to collective farm members who found any animals.
Goloshchekin, under pressure from the Central Committee, promised to send an additional fifteen thousand head of cattle to Leningrad due to the city’s “difficulties.”
The commission found that the republic had lost an astonishing 28.7 million head of livestock in the first two years of the First Five-Year Plan, nearly 70 percent of its livestock herds. In an attempt to absolve Moscow of any responsibility, the commission concluded that many of these losses could be attributed to Kazakhs’ sale and slaughter of their livestock ( razbazarivanie, literally, squandering), as well as the mistakes of local officials.
By the famine’s end in 1934, some 1.5 million people, a quarter of the republic’s population, had perished in a cataclysm of unprecedented proportions.
over a million starving refugees from Kazakhstan flooded neighboring Soviet territories such as Kirgizia, Uzbekistan, the Middle Volga and Western Siberia, as well as China (especially the western province known as Xinjiang)
The famine claimed the lives of more than a million Kazakhs, approximately 40 percent of all Kazakhs in the republic. Ultimately, the Kazakhs would lose a greater percentage of their population due to famine than even the Ukrainians.
In theory, Kazakhs were supposed to be supplied with additional grain to compensate for the loss of their previous food base, their animal herds. But the republic’s third secretary, Lev Roshal′, admitted that this project was going “very badly,” as various agencies squabbled about who had failed to supply Kazakhs with adequate amounts of grain.
Moreover, many nomadic regions were still being asked to deliver grain: in the fall of 1930.
On July 1, 1931, Stalin sent Goloshchekin an angry telegram, informing him that he would hold him personally responsible for the delivery of sixty-four thousand tons of grain from the republic’s remote regions.
Faced with Stalin’s wrath, Roshal′ quickly began to demand more grain from the regions. In a telegram to Aksuisk district, a majority Kazakh region, he ordered the delivery of two hundred tons of grain within five days, warning, “The kraikom will consider the slightest delay in the fulfillment of the plan as your personal deliberate desire not to fulfill the task of the party.”
Communism does not ignore scarcity, in fact it recognizes it in one of the most popular slogans of commuism. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Communism promises the people what they need which is stuff like food, shelter, water for all and most importantly, it requests your labor value in return. This isn't a truly post-scarcity society (akin to the Federation from Star Trek) which while an ideal one for a communist state to aspire to, is impossible at least right now.
Idk, communism was supposed to be about owning the means of production. Like, this post is about petite bourgeoisie, which is a class that already owns their means of production, hence won't help the proletariat in their goal [of owning the means of production].
This system that stalin built feels more like feudalism. They just keep extorting grain and livestock from the peasants to build capital and invest it into the industry, and the peasants have no say in any of it.
In fairness to Marx, Pol Pot was on his own bullshit and not really a communist. He was closer to an Evola-type figure who believed first and foremost in a hyper-nationalist, anti-modernist, psuedo-spiritul movement... which could only be achieved by massacring all non-khmers and khmers who were "unfit" for the return to a quasi-mystical state of pure communal pastoralism under absolute cultural/ethnic hegemony.
As for the others, Marx doesn't have much room to wiggle out of their fallout.
Technically they already do. Iran revolution guard is considered to be the true power and they run the economy. And agreement that keeps Ayatollah in power. That's why Iran can't be a free market while having a theocracy. They have a theocracy and a military "guided" economy. Not fully north Korean but close.
Oligarchy is any system in which power is in the hands of a few people. It is usually synonymous with cronyism and corruption.
My point is more that technocracy, where allegedly those few are chosen for their merits, knowledge, and skill, doesn't really happen, and instead collapses into bog standard oligarchy.
The ideal technocracy is still held by the glue of democracy. The individuals running for election must be qualified and able to excel at their task, but it is up to the people to decide who exactly will take ths position.
Hey let's be a little optimistic maybe out of nowhere we get the Achaeminid restoration and an embracement of multi culturalism and the rebuild the Acheaminid Empire.
Iran's next leaders are very smart and they're in Evin prison right now. Reza Pahlavi is the transition because he is living abroad and hasa huge following. But the ballot boxes will decide our country's future!
So we're full on imperialist shah propaganda? Actually lying about what was done by him, and what led to him being overthrown by every part of the Iranian, including the religious far-right.
Well, considering the timing, I'm not even surprised
Imagine a comedy series where Marx actually meets people like Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao and reacts to how they interpreted his ideas. It'd be so peak. "Pol Pot what the fuck? Where did I write the words killing fields? WHERE?!"
Fun (?) fact: Pol Pot probably never even really read Marx. Khmer Rouge ideology was a mix of Chinese maoism, French revolution and native Khmer history (slavery and great projects of Angkor Empire).
Marx seeing all the dictators of the 20th century that used his ideology as an excuse to do awful shit:
"Look how they massacred my boy."
"Liquidation of the bourgeoisie" is fairly clear.
That Marx didn't specifically describe using shovels to beat people's heads in doesn't make him notably better.
I'm fairly sure that Hitler doesn't specifically describe gas chambers in Mein Kampf.
Liquidation the way Marx wrote it meant dissolution or clearance. The Bolsheviks, inspired by the Jacobins Revolutionaries, made it into a Terror thingy, where they slaughtered their opponents wholesale. Stalin used that word as a euphemism for mass murder, and it kept that meaning since.
BTW, in Mein Kampf, Hitler didn't use allegories or stay vague on the matter:
See how Marx and Hitler contrast?
While Marx doesn't describe killing grounds specifically, he calls for a violent revolution in which entire classes of people will be "liquidated".
And if we want to compare Hitler and Marx, then we can:
So he wants all the people responsible for Capitalism to be "liquidated" and believes the Jews are responsible for Capitalism. Do you see where this goes?
Edit: As for the "liquidation doesn't mean killing" line, that defence didn't work at Nuremberg.
I understand what you mean. I'm telling you that it's a bad interpretation based on shaky associations. I think you read neither Marx or Hitler and you jump to conclusions based on quotes you picked from the internet.
Marx called religion the opium of the people and was highly critical of all faiths, including his own. Yeah, he was Jewish. He also called the US Civil War an example of revolutions and called Lincoln a real Communist.
What are you talking about? This doesn't even make sense.
An attempt was made by one of the defendants at Nuremberg (Kaltenbrunner, if I recall correctly) to argue that the various euphamisms used for the Holocaust, e.g. "liquidation" didn't mean killing. It didn't work. My point is that attempting to sanitise the calls for mass murder inherent in Marx's writings are approximately as plausible as that defence, and are indeed identical to it.
Marx is explicitly not referring to religion in that essay (emphasis mine):
He was talking about dissolving the Jews as a people, through violence (Marx did not envision anything but a highly violent revolution). There had been a number of attempts to dissolve entire peoples through violence by that point. There is a word for it today: Genocide.
I have read enough of Marx at university to see through his bullshit. I think you haven't read Marx at all, and moving to the "just read theory, bro" defence is a sign you haven't got an answer for the awful shit he believed, yet are still trying to defend him.
Marx is, in fact, referring to religion in the segment you quoted and is part of a wider discourse on general discrimination against Jews in Christian states. An exerpt from the paragraph before the one you posted reads:
Similarly the paragraph following reads:
Is it antisemitic? Yes. Does he advocate for the extermination of the Jewish people? No.
Marx argues that under communism there would be no need for huckstering or money, and as a result, it would be impossible "to be a jew." Is the foundation of his analysis antisemitic? Once again, yes. Marx was antisemitic, most people were at the time, and Germans especially so. Was he more antisemitic that your average German? Maybe? Is he arguing for Jews to be publicly hung and left to rot? NO!
I think you should brush up on the Marx you read at university because you have missed the mark by quite the margin here.
He is arguing for the Jews to cease to be, through a violent revolution.
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. show us what happens when Marx's plans on groups ceasing to be don't happen by themselves.
Marx's theories are the direct inspiration for those mass killings, whether you like it or not.
Edit: Also, he isn't talking about the Jews as a religious group, or their religion. He is talking about them as a minority group at all. That's what he means by the "emancipation of humanity" bit, he wants all distinctions and all groups to be subsumed into class consciousness only.
So anyone who identifies as anything but their class is a problem for Marx.
Marx believed that violence was the only way that problems could or should be solved. He was explicitly opposed to things like the SPD because they called for reform via the ballot box.
So we have minorities being a problem, and violence being the way that Marx called for problems to be solved. Where do you think this is going to end up?
You are just repeating the statement you made earlier.
If you by "arguing for the Jews to cease to be, through a violent revolution" mean "arguing for a revolution that abolishes private property and money, leading to the foundation for being Jewish (which in his eyes is money and huckstering) to disappear, leading to the disappearance of spiritual and secular jewishness" then yes, I suppose you are somewhat correct.
In regards to the" emancipation of the world from Judaism" bit, if you had bothered to read further, you would find the following:
Marx argues that the Judaism and money are inseparable and the "emancipation of the world from Judaism" is to be more akin to the "emancipation of the world from a society centered around money."
Unless you also intend to portray it as if he wishes to exterminate the Christians as well since they "have become jews." /s
Now, I cannot speak for Marx, but his close collaborator and editor Engels had some words about the "peaceful abolition of private property" found in "The principles of Communism" section 16:
Edit: As far as minorities and class consciousness goes, his views were that the primary division between people was class, not religion or race, etc. The primary reason being that the ruling class, I.e. the bourgeoisie were and are using things like race and religion to divide the proletariat and distract them for furthering their own interest. You don't care that the factory owner makes an order of magnitude more than you because you are too busy worrying about immigrants coming in and stealing the work, when in reality it is in both your and the immigrant's interest to seize the means of production and divide the money between you. It is after all, you who do all the work, while the factory owner just owns the tools and machinery that the work is being performed with. Alternatively, the media and politicians are telling you to worry about trans people and immigrants, funneling your anger and outrage towards them instead of the people siphoning off value from the work you do etc.
I mean, he is pretty clear that he considers religion to be a bad thing that should be gotten rid of, so yes, he also wants to get rid of Christians through violence. That's implicit in his worldview.
We can see how his followers )tried to impose atheism), by the way. It wasn't by polite argument.
Also, his violent revolution isn't intended to "divide the money" between the workers, it is intended to create a society that produces "the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor".
The idea is to force everyone to be good proletarians, and nothing else, indeed, in Critique of the Gotha Programme, he largely endorses the idea of a world where "everyone is only a worker like everyone else" (emphasis mine), as a necessary precondition of his "higher phase of communist society": "only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
The end goal is a classless, moneyless society, accomplished by forcing everyone to join the class he liked, and give the state all of the money. An interpretation in which he doesn't endorse a totalitarian state that uses violence to achieve these ends requires a view of Marx that is so incapable of following the logic of his argument as to be mentally disabled. That would be uncharitable compared to simply accepting he was supportive of violence and totalitarianism.
He didn't want people to live as they willed, they were to live as he willed they should.
You say that as if even half the people killed by Pol Pot, Stalin, or Mao were bourgeoisie the reasons they're considered monsters is they kinda didn't stop after the revolution had infact destroyed their countries bourgeoisie.
No, I would say the reason they were (not considered, they just were) monsters was that they murdered millions of people.
They were also of the view that the people they were murdering were the bourgeoisie. Own the land you farm? Bourgeoisie. Own 2 pairs of shoes? Bourgeoisie. Own glasses? You better believe, bourgeoisie.
If you are saying they were only bad for murdering the wrong people, you are on par with Netanyahu saying Hitler was only bad because he targeted the Jews rather than Muslims.
Destroy the bourgeoisie is subject to interruption. Arguably after you have confiscated property from all classes you have infact achieved Marx's liquidation. During the communist revolution in China,Russia, and Cambodia they infact achieved this after the collapse of the various systems that proceeded them. In otherwords along specifically Marx's definition there were infact no Bourgeoisie because private property had been confiscated by the state. Yet Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin quickly learned all Autocracy work pretty much the same way. So they began purges to instill fear in the population. Marx's envisioned revolution was quickly abandoned do to well human nature. Stalin would even nake moves directly contradicting the global communist movement to serve his own self interest in any given moment. What Pol Pot defines as bourgeoisie does not matter to my main point because it directly contradicts with Marx's own definition of the term showing a divergence in the term and is the classic Autocratic move to take advantage of low literacy rates and rewrite the ideology for what yoy need to maintain control.
"That's not the real thing", everyone take a shot. To the back of the head if Marx's fanboys get their way.
But it's true. No one has ever followed Marx to the letter as far as I know. Like yes, it is still communism, but not communism as envisioned by Marx. It's like what Mormonism is to the Catholic Church, both descended from the same ideas with differing execution.
As long as you are not saying "but guys communism can totally work frfr just trust" its okay to say the idea is a good one.
It sadly falls apart as soon as it comes into contact with real people.
No where did I say communism would work, I just said that Marx's communism is different from the communism we've seen in real life.
Yes. I just wanted to nip the people in the butt that interpret your comment that way.
"There! He said it! Its never done before in real life! It can work hurr durr"
Not you said that but many people do and might take your comment that way.
I think the main problem was that they lacked the knowledge of statesmanship.
Here are a few passages from The Hungry Steppe, by Sarah Cameron (2018) (published by Cornell).
It talks about how the soviets killed the entire economy of central asia, a primarily livestock economy. 90% of the livestock was lost, lead to famine and refugees.
That's what happens when you make a peasant into a king.
Like, it was the same deal with the communist romanian leader (Ceausescu). He only finished primary school (his wife too), and is responsible for killing the romanian economy by taxing the people and focusing on paying off foreign debt, rather than growing the economy. It's like, communists have an allergy for intelligentsia.
I mean communism ignores scarcity as a concept shit was already fucked. Yet they also the paranoia filled purges to top it all off.
Communism does not ignore scarcity, in fact it recognizes it in one of the most popular slogans of commuism. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Communism promises the people what they need which is stuff like food, shelter, water for all and most importantly, it requests your labor value in return. This isn't a truly post-scarcity society (akin to the Federation from Star Trek) which while an ideal one for a communist state to aspire to, is impossible at least right now.
Idk, communism was supposed to be about owning the means of production. Like, this post is about petite bourgeoisie, which is a class that already owns their means of production, hence won't help the proletariat in their goal [of owning the means of production].
This system that stalin built feels more like feudalism. They just keep extorting grain and livestock from the peasants to build capital and invest it into the industry, and the peasants have no say in any of it.
It could be they're all sitting at a table in hell talking about events.
In fairness to Marx, Pol Pot was on his own bullshit and not really a communist. He was closer to an Evola-type figure who believed first and foremost in a hyper-nationalist, anti-modernist, psuedo-spiritul movement... which could only be achieved by massacring all non-khmers and khmers who were "unfit" for the return to a quasi-mystical state of pure communal pastoralism under absolute cultural/ethnic hegemony.
As for the others, Marx doesn't have much room to wiggle out of their fallout.
It was decisions like these that give the impression that he wanted to be overthrown.
To quote a very famous marx quote: "ALL MY STUDENTS ARE FUCKING MOROOOOOOONSSSS"
So what's next for Iran? We've had idiot monarchists and idiot clerics running the country. I'm betting on idiot junta.
Technically they already do. Iran revolution guard is considered to be the true power and they run the economy. And agreement that keeps Ayatollah in power. That's why Iran can't be a free market while having a theocracy. They have a theocracy and a military "guided" economy. Not fully north Korean but close.
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/iran-revolutionary-guard-control-economy-060144197.html
So, idiot technocrats next?
They can't be idiots by definition
Maybe there's just a shortage of qualified people, and idiots are the best available.
Have you seen Elon Musk?
He's not a technocrat. He's an oligarch
This implies there is ever a difference.
There is, technocracy is more closer to a council than oligarchy which is centralised around a CEO
Oligarchy is any system in which power is in the hands of a few people. It is usually synonymous with cronyism and corruption.
My point is more that technocracy, where allegedly those few are chosen for their merits, knowledge, and skill, doesn't really happen, and instead collapses into bog standard oligarchy.
The ideal technocracy is still held by the glue of democracy. The individuals running for election must be qualified and able to excel at their task, but it is up to the people to decide who exactly will take ths position.
Hey let's be a little optimistic maybe out of nowhere we get the Achaeminid restoration and an embracement of multi culturalism and the rebuild the Acheaminid Empire.
Iran's next leaders are very smart and they're in Evin prison right now. Reza Pahlavi is the transition because he is living abroad and hasa huge following. But the ballot boxes will decide our country's future!
The shah is actually the goat. Pretty bollocks ruler but he had incredible style
Bring back the Shah
So we're full on imperialist shah propaganda? Actually lying about what was done by him, and what led to him being overthrown by every part of the Iranian, including the religious far-right.
Well, considering the timing, I'm not even surprised
Awful
The Shah of Iran and bad decisions: Name a more iconic duo.