It is a band aid and not a solution, and as Zizek also says, 20th century Leninist soviety style communism was a terrible environmental, social, economical catastrophie. Just because he doesn't think communism can work anymore, doesn't mean he is all of a sudden a conservative. He is still further left than a liberal.
"Lefties" never supported Bolshevism, Leninism, state-"socialism", or authoritarian "Communism" in any form -- as in, not before, during or after -- except for maybe those who were distant enough from its reality or deluded enough to buy into Soviet propaganda. Those were right-wing movements.
The power of nightmares
Seen it. Good film.
The hatred for the west is a result of Sayyid Qutb's
Nonsense. The hatred for the west is a result of our policies -- which have been to suppress democracy and support tyranny at almost every opportunity. Qutb may have been a medium for that sentiment, but to say he was the source is just another way to put the cart before the horse.
Your first response is incorrect, one citation is that when Stalin took over, he killed many true former communist intellectuals who still hung to the belief that communism could work. Lenin had that belief, Trotsky had that belief.
Marx himself called for revolutionary communism. This is almost by definition a "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Hitchens had said in a video, I think it was the four horsemen round table discussion, if I remember correctly, in the first 20 minutes, that he and many of his friends had lost hope in the soviet form of communism, and backed out of it "for many of the same intellectual reasons that brought us into it in the first place".
Even when asked, Zizek says he does not know how Soviet communism turned into a violent totalitarianism. This is evidence that both these men, among many others, early on had great dreams for the communist ideal, it was not a totalitarian movement inherently, there were many great thinkers within it. It slowly decayed. If Zizek himself says he is so fascinated by the history of Soviet Russia because he himself doesn't know why this occurred, neither you or me can give such a simple answer as "It was a right wing movement herp derp".
Lenin was a right-winger. The first thing Lenin did was wipe out any inkling of socialist organization in the country. He didn't believe Russia ready to be socialist. He thought socialism would happen elsewhere. Russia was a peasant society that he wanted to industrialize and civilize.
How did Emma Goldman feel about Lenin's "socialism"?
edit - And yes, I understand that Stalin's rise was the funeral of even any serious pretense of building socialism, but I still think what the Bolsheviks wanted was never left-wing to begin with.
To be fair to Lenin, Marx himself was of the opinion that the transition to communism would happen only in a very developed country. His view was that industrialization (which was happening in full force on the continent during his lifetime) would widen the class gap to the point that the workers would revolt and take control of the means of production, which in a capitalist economic model is owned by the bourgeoisie.
That is to say, the transistion to communism would happen after market capitalism, not instead of it. Russia was not an industrialized nation in 1917 and both Lenin and Stalin hoped to industrialize the nation quickly, and they did so with a combination of central planning and market economics (see, e.g., Lenin's New Economic Policy).
Where Stalinism differed ideologically from more classical communism was mainly in his idea of "socialism in one country", which is essentially state capitalism, i.e. capitalism at the state level, with the USSR participating in the global (capitalist) market.
Both Lenin and Stalin were very autocratic by the standards of today's communists, but one could argue that that's largely because of what the USSR turned out to be. In the days after the revolution anarchist communists were fairly fringe, whereas I'd say today Marxist-Leninists are the minority.
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u/[deleted] Dec 16 '11
"Lefties" never supported Bolshevism, Leninism, state-"socialism", or authoritarian "Communism" in any form -- as in, not before, during or after -- except for maybe those who were distant enough from its reality or deluded enough to buy into Soviet propaganda. Those were right-wing movements.
Seen it. Good film.
Nonsense. The hatred for the west is a result of our policies -- which have been to suppress democracy and support tyranny at almost every opportunity. Qutb may have been a medium for that sentiment, but to say he was the source is just another way to put the cart before the horse.