Oh, that clears it up, I see now liquidating the right sort of people “who deserve it” is a far-left thing that is righteous, and liquidating the wrong people who, as the right say “”“”“deserve it”“”" is a far-right thing that is evil.
Before I read this, I was a stupid centrist who thought you shouldn’t liquidate groups of people at all, thank you for showing me the right way
Is it possible that there is a better a solution to the issues of Capitalism which doesn’t involve the liquidation of entire groups of people?
Being a person who have visited communist meetings, this is my biggest gripe with the ideology. Yes, capitalism today has become corrupted, perhaps even beyond repair. But, I refuse to believe that the only solution is to round up and kill the capitalist bosses in order to bring back power to the working class. At this point, we would be dehumanizing an entire group of people which wouldn’t make us much better than what the far-right does.
I believe you’ve misunderstood what “eliminating a social class” means, and the history of socialism.
Eliminating a social class doesn’t mean murdering everyone who belongs to it, it means eliminating the position they hold in society. If you take all capitalists, and take all of their means of production and redistribute them among the workers, you’ve eliminated the capitalists as a class, without the need to exterminate the individuals.
An example would be dekulakization in the USSR. Rich peasants, or kulaks, who owned lands and employed other peasants to work their lands, were subjected to forced collectivisation of their lands, between the late 1920s and throughout 1930s. This was promoted by the soviet authorities, but mostly enacted by peasants themselves who denounced kulaks for expropriation. The policy was so popular and poor peasants had such desire to expropriate the kulaks, that the central authorities had to enforce limits on percentage of people denounced as kulaks in a given territory, because it was too much. But the penalty to kulaks was rarely ever execution, it was expropriation itself, and in more extreme cases, exile to other parts of the USSR. Dekulakization took place without the murder of all kulaks, although it was a very chaotic, inefficient, and rather violent process. Of course, Marxist-Leninists are interested in the mistakes of the past, and on how we’d enforce this policy in a more efficient, less violent way. That’s why we’re interested in Marxist history and communist countries, and the reasons why policies were applied a given way, instead of superficial analysis of “X person was bad and that’s why things were bad”.
This is a fair point, but a general premise to Marxism is a bloody revolution where the working class takes the assets from capitalist bosses. Perhaps some Marxist are interested in alternative methods, but the group of communist members with which I was able to discuss this topic with were not concerned with that.
They demonized and dehumanized capitalist and talked about them as if they were not worth saving, and it was this kind of rhetoric that turned me off from their cause.
Though, it was also their rhetoric which presumed racism and sexism would be solved if we all just view eachother as workers. This seemed to underplay the effects these caste systems have on people.
So you believe that there’s something like a group of people that will always be striving to be these capitalist overlords and that there’s no one in the rest of the population that would display that corrupt desire for power? Either this stinks of eugenics or you’re simply naive.
Firstly what does it help us killing that group, when the system doesn’t change? Secondly if both change, the system needs to be so that people striving to corrupt power will not be able to achieve that power. I’ve yet to see a system that managed that.
The soviet union for one certainly didn’t. In fact that is a playbook example of how not to do it, right besides the first french revolution.
If you believe that by killing the “corrupt overlords” you won’t be getting any more corrupt people striving for power, we’re once again at the point is this eugenics or are you naive.
Just to be clear, “extermination of a social group” wasn’t ever the extermination of the individuals. Dekulakization was mostly carried out by poor farmers, not by a central authority, and the harshest penalty was normally forced relocation, not murder. The masses were so hungry against the kulaks that the soviet government literally had to introduce maximum quotas of who was designated a kulak because poor farmers were rabid against them.
Dekulakization was a fucking mess, but it wasn’t an extermination in the genocidal sense of the word.
deleted by creator
Very cool, justifying the extermination of a social group as “deserved”. Any more who “deserved it”?
deleted by creator
Oh, that clears it up, I see now liquidating the right sort of people “who deserve it” is a far-left thing that is righteous, and liquidating the wrong people who, as the right say “”“”“deserve it”“”" is a far-right thing that is evil.
Before I read this, I was a stupid centrist who thought you shouldn’t liquidate groups of people at all, thank you for showing me the right way
Man that guy really went all out to assist you in making your point didn’t he?
deleted by creator
Is it possible that there is a better a solution to the issues of Capitalism which doesn’t involve the liquidation of entire groups of people?
Being a person who have visited communist meetings, this is my biggest gripe with the ideology. Yes, capitalism today has become corrupted, perhaps even beyond repair. But, I refuse to believe that the only solution is to round up and kill the capitalist bosses in order to bring back power to the working class. At this point, we would be dehumanizing an entire group of people which wouldn’t make us much better than what the far-right does.
I believe you’ve misunderstood what “eliminating a social class” means, and the history of socialism.
Eliminating a social class doesn’t mean murdering everyone who belongs to it, it means eliminating the position they hold in society. If you take all capitalists, and take all of their means of production and redistribute them among the workers, you’ve eliminated the capitalists as a class, without the need to exterminate the individuals.
An example would be dekulakization in the USSR. Rich peasants, or kulaks, who owned lands and employed other peasants to work their lands, were subjected to forced collectivisation of their lands, between the late 1920s and throughout 1930s. This was promoted by the soviet authorities, but mostly enacted by peasants themselves who denounced kulaks for expropriation. The policy was so popular and poor peasants had such desire to expropriate the kulaks, that the central authorities had to enforce limits on percentage of people denounced as kulaks in a given territory, because it was too much. But the penalty to kulaks was rarely ever execution, it was expropriation itself, and in more extreme cases, exile to other parts of the USSR. Dekulakization took place without the murder of all kulaks, although it was a very chaotic, inefficient, and rather violent process. Of course, Marxist-Leninists are interested in the mistakes of the past, and on how we’d enforce this policy in a more efficient, less violent way. That’s why we’re interested in Marxist history and communist countries, and the reasons why policies were applied a given way, instead of superficial analysis of “X person was bad and that’s why things were bad”.
This is a fair point, but a general premise to Marxism is a bloody revolution where the working class takes the assets from capitalist bosses. Perhaps some Marxist are interested in alternative methods, but the group of communist members with which I was able to discuss this topic with were not concerned with that.
They demonized and dehumanized capitalist and talked about them as if they were not worth saving, and it was this kind of rhetoric that turned me off from their cause.
Though, it was also their rhetoric which presumed racism and sexism would be solved if we all just view eachother as workers. This seemed to underplay the effects these caste systems have on people.
Liquidation of assests
So you believe that there’s something like a group of people that will always be striving to be these capitalist overlords and that there’s no one in the rest of the population that would display that corrupt desire for power? Either this stinks of eugenics or you’re simply naive. Firstly what does it help us killing that group, when the system doesn’t change? Secondly if both change, the system needs to be so that people striving to corrupt power will not be able to achieve that power. I’ve yet to see a system that managed that. The soviet union for one certainly didn’t. In fact that is a playbook example of how not to do it, right besides the first french revolution. If you believe that by killing the “corrupt overlords” you won’t be getting any more corrupt people striving for power, we’re once again at the point is this eugenics or are you naive.
deleted by creator
Yes and that state only still exists because the lend-lease their doctors to the entire world and make the high-priced rum and cigars.
deleted by creator
The good ol whataboutism here again I see…
deleted by creator
Just to be clear, “extermination of a social group” wasn’t ever the extermination of the individuals. Dekulakization was mostly carried out by poor farmers, not by a central authority, and the harshest penalty was normally forced relocation, not murder. The masses were so hungry against the kulaks that the soviet government literally had to introduce maximum quotas of who was designated a kulak because poor farmers were rabid against them.
Dekulakization was a fucking mess, but it wasn’t an extermination in the genocidal sense of the word.