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mistersandmanFor my last history requirement, I thought it would be fun to take a break from East Asian history and take a class simply titled “Stalin.” According to my professor, the life of Stalin is best understood if you accept that he was a good socialist before all else. And if we, as students are to truly understand Stalin, we need to understand socialism. And so we exhausted the first month of classes on the study of the Communist Manifesto and other writings that may have shaped the Young Stalin’s concept of socialism.
All of that makes sense, I suppose, if you accept the part where dedication to socialism becomes the standard by which you judge Joseph Stalin.
…
But I must digress. That’s a topic for another day, such as that happy day when I’m studying for my Stalin Final and I really really want to be doing something else.
The last time I read the Communist Manifesto I was in high school. My physics teacher discovered the library’s copy of the book in my backpack and for the rest of the year the running joke was that I was the biggest commie there ever was and I represented a great threat to American Values. In reality, I was just a kid interested in philosophy and tantalized by notoriety, and I must admit I didn’t get a lot out of it philosophically.
And so, my true introduction to Communism came through study of Chinese Communism, and Chinese Communism is special. Like many Western socialist movements of the early twentieth century, the Chinese Communist party was founded by urban intellectual elites who thought they knew what was best for the workers of the world. And then Chiang Kai-shek killed just about all of them in April 1927 and an unsuccessful peasant revolutionary seized the reins of the Chinese Communist movement.
People have drawn many comparisons between Stalin and Mao, Stalin and Mao included. However, I don’t know if anyone could ever accuse Mao of being a good socialist above all else. Mao did what Mao did and he called it Communism.
And that’s fine by me. Having read Marx, Engels, Bukarin, and Kautsky, it seems to me that Communism is just as exploitative as the bourgeois system it desires to replace. The early Communist movement seems very paternalistic—the educated socialists spread the Good News to the hapless workers in hopes that they can harness the manpower of the proletariat. They would found a golden age in the name of the workers’ class but shaped by the agenda of the bourgeoisie intellectuals. Strip away the claims of compassion and you have two factions of capitalists scrambling for dominance, both clumsily wielding the working class to their profit.
The Communist Party of China perfectly embodies that irony. It has followed Communism to its full logical conclusion. The revolution hasn’t become a dinner party, it was *always* a dinner party.
You're stunned, I know. This is basically the biggest philosophical breakthrough since Socrates was stinking up the Acropolis. Anyway, while I'm referencing Hu's visit to America, I'm going to link to this picture, which is basically the most adorable thing ever. I'd like to write a post on the significance of his visit sometime soon, but I honestly probably won't get to it.
All of that makes sense, I suppose, if you accept the part where dedication to socialism becomes the standard by which you judge Joseph Stalin.
…
But I must digress. That’s a topic for another day, such as that happy day when I’m studying for my Stalin Final and I really really want to be doing something else.
The last time I read the Communist Manifesto I was in high school. My physics teacher discovered the library’s copy of the book in my backpack and for the rest of the year the running joke was that I was the biggest commie there ever was and I represented a great threat to American Values. In reality, I was just a kid interested in philosophy and tantalized by notoriety, and I must admit I didn’t get a lot out of it philosophically.
And so, my true introduction to Communism came through study of Chinese Communism, and Chinese Communism is special. Like many Western socialist movements of the early twentieth century, the Chinese Communist party was founded by urban intellectual elites who thought they knew what was best for the workers of the world. And then Chiang Kai-shek killed just about all of them in April 1927 and an unsuccessful peasant revolutionary seized the reins of the Chinese Communist movement.
People have drawn many comparisons between Stalin and Mao, Stalin and Mao included. However, I don’t know if anyone could ever accuse Mao of being a good socialist above all else. Mao did what Mao did and he called it Communism.
And that’s fine by me. Having read Marx, Engels, Bukarin, and Kautsky, it seems to me that Communism is just as exploitative as the bourgeois system it desires to replace. The early Communist movement seems very paternalistic—the educated socialists spread the Good News to the hapless workers in hopes that they can harness the manpower of the proletariat. They would found a golden age in the name of the workers’ class but shaped by the agenda of the bourgeoisie intellectuals. Strip away the claims of compassion and you have two factions of capitalists scrambling for dominance, both clumsily wielding the working class to their profit.
The Communist Party of China perfectly embodies that irony. It has followed Communism to its full logical conclusion. The revolution hasn’t become a dinner party, it was *always* a dinner party.
You're stunned, I know. This is basically the biggest philosophical breakthrough since Socrates was stinking up the Acropolis. Anyway, while I'm referencing Hu's visit to America, I'm going to link to this picture, which is basically the most adorable thing ever. I'd like to write a post on the significance of his visit sometime soon, but I honestly probably won't get to it.
