One time on a whim I registered at a conspiracy message board. It was one of those cases where you jump through all the registration hoops, everything appears to go as it's supposed to go, but you can never actually log in. No biggy. I can't post there but they send me email alerts from time to time. Some of them are fun.

I got a recent one directing me to a thread where the poster suggested maybe communism isn't such a bad thing. One of his points was there has only been actual, for real communism once in human history, and this according to this guy was a period of historic utopia. The other periods and places labeled communist were not for real, actual, communism, according to him, so they don't apply to his point about what a wonderful thing living under communism would be.

So, the period of harmonic bliss according conspiracy guy was Russia under Lenin. All others addressing this guy's points appeared to accept this as fact. Now me, I'm a bit of a history dunce, so I had to look that up.

From a quick browsing Google search on the subject it appeared not all agree with the communist expert on the conspiracy site.

You guys know more history than I do, so tell me if I got this right. There was a civil war under Lenin - Reds versus Whites. Conspiracy guy says there wasn't, but others appear to think there was. During this period Lenin brought in something the Google guys were calling "War Communism". They seemed to think that was an ugly time. War, starvation, poverty, and all that other bad stuff. Millions of deaths.

OK so following that I get the impression Lenin wasn't completely happy with the way things were going, so he brought in something called the New Economic Plan. The NEP. This was communism, with a dash of capitalism where needed. Something like China's current system, maybe.

Question. Is my understanding after a quick google search a fair assessment? And another one. Can you see parallels between Lenins NEP, and the direction Obama's going?

The comparison you hear most often to Obama's policies is to Roosevelt's New Deal, but as I browsed info on this NEP it seemed like maybe it fit even better.

Oh, one more. Concerning just the NEP, conspiracy guy was kind of right, wasn't he? The NEP appeared to be working. Things looked to be getting better for that brief period, weren't they? Then Stalin takes over, and suddenly not so much with the goodies. Is that correct?

   

   

"Conspiracy Guy" is flat ass wrong. The political lexicon even recognizes Lenin's brand of communism as "Leninsm" which does differ from Marxism and the later has NOT been achieved in the manner Marx envisioned yet in history. And "historic utopia"?!? I'd love to see the evidence for that one.

   

Actual, real communism has never been achieved in the same sense that actual, real capitalism has never been employed. Both ideal states require perfectly virtuous human beings to work exactly as desired. Only one, however, actually uses the reality of human nature to work in more practical circumstances.

Also, communism is immoral, but hey, that's a completely different argument.

   

I wouldn't go that far as to say it's wholly immoral. I can empathise with what Marx and Engels envisioned and their motives for doing so. Of course, the means by which they wanted to achieve their goals are antithical to human nature so obviously they won't ever work and the only make some form of Communism is by way of a dictatorship or autocratic regime.

   

And another thing; to compare what Obama's doing in the US and Communism as it was practiced by Lenin and Trotsky is utter bollocks. Last week I was the funeral of a person who lived through the [i]real[i/] Communism. Religious persecution, the gov't secret police taking your loved ones away for no reason, forced impoverishment. The rhetoric coming from FOX News these days is nothing but outright fearmongering and will do nothing but incite even more crazies to act out like one did in Pittsburgh this weekend.

   

Here we go:

Basically here is what happened. After Russia removed itself from WWI a civil war ensued between the Reds and the Whites. For a whole range of reasons I won't get into, the Reds one and the war ended in 1921. After this Lenin began to implement socialism, and crazy guy is right about the fact that it was as close to a socialist society as we have seen. Stores were nationalized, co-ops introduced and the state structure was drastically reduced etc. But there was a huge problem in that it had been too fast and people were starving and suffering and they realized that a state of some sort was needed to manage the whole thing. So he instituted the NEP which allowed people to sell their surplus production for profits. Essentially created small 'c' capitalism amongst socialism. This carried on until Stalin who said 'the hell with this' and tried to create a true socialist state. He eventually failed as well and they became this weird soviet interpretation of socialism that was maintained until the reforms of Gorbachev and the fall of the USSR.

And that concludes my studying for my Soviet History exam in two weeks.

**Edit** NEP was working and working quite well at first. But eventually it too began to stagnate. It was slowly causing inflation and people couldn't afford to buy anything so a black market once again sprung up. What Obama is doing is completely different because he isn't nationalizing everything, the bailouts are temporary loans which is drastically different to NEP. Obama is trying to implement some controls back into the system that have been removed to try and prevent such a collapse from happening again.

   

I'm as pleased to take this direction as with any other.

Definition:
communism - a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.

Axiom:
Taking someone's personal property without their consent and without proper justification/compensation is wrong.

Argument:
In order to move from a society with any amount of personal property to a communist society, one must violate the preceding principle.

Conclusion:
Communism is immoral.

Of course, this is overly simplistic.
-Ideally all individuals would voluntarily give up their property.
-Proper justification is hard to pin down. Just look at eminent domain.

It just stands to reason that any implementation of communism in the real world would require immoral action, whereas capitalism will have immoral people, but not force such things upon people by default.

   

Interesting. I particularly liked Pseudonym's morality argument. Well played, sir. Well played.

As someone living in Russia right now who studied Russian history I can say that the socialist paradise envisioned by Marx and Engels never even began to materialize in Russia. In 1917 Russia was mostly a peasant-based agrarian society, and Marx had specifically singled Russia out as a place where a Communist revolution should NOT happen. There was no large proletariat in Russia.

What Lenin did was try to turn the peasantry into a proletariat overnight, and he started this during the civil war. He didn't succeed, as over 85% of the country was still tied to their subsistence farm plots by the time Stalin took power, and that guy FORCED everyone into his weird vision of the world.

Read "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a former prisoner in Stalin's GULAG system. He describes in detail how the reign of terror credited to Stalin actually began in 1917 under Lenin, grew in intensity during the civil war and had become a fine science by 1921.

The two words contradict each other: "utopia" and "terror"

   

The long and short of communism vs. capitalism is found in the truth that most capitalist countries have rules to keep a flood of people out.

Communist countries have rules to keep people in.

   

ya your conspiracy guy is completely wrong, and you are right about the information you found. living under lenin was no picnic... maybe just in the shadow of stalin no one really talks about it. or they can say "it wasnt THAT bad"

its also interesting, because russians obviously know about all of these things which happpened. im not sure about moscow but in st. petersburg you wont find pictures of stalin anywhere anymore. but lenin is still all over the place! streets and squares and statues and engravings all over the city

   

Ask Conspiracy idiot if he has ever seen Dr. Zhivago.


Oh and us imperialist Whites sent troops from France, Britain, the US, Finland and
Czechoslovakia.

A very very big mess it was.