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 Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 1:29 pm
Almost every week I get into an argument with somebody at school about Communism and Socialism, and although I love the discussions, I dislike it when they never learn. They keep harping on me for supporting social welfare programs, peace movements, communist leaders, etc.
True, I live in the most Republican part of my state, but seriously, does anyone else have to put up with a bunch of crap from ignorant and intolerant people?
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Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 1:32 pm
Raziel Hotokashi Almost every week I get into an argument with somebody at school about Communism and Socialism, and although I love the discussions, I dislike it when they never learn. They keep harping on me for supporting social welfare programs, peace movements, communist leaders, etc. True, I live in the most Republican part of my state, but seriously, does anyone else have to put up with a bunch of crap from ignorant and intolerant people? Don't worry about winning over students, Most of them don't know the value of work just yet and how hard it actually is out there, All you can do at present is educate yourself and keep debating. But to answer your question, yes, All the time.
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Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 1:42 pm
One of the things that gets me riled up is how they attack Mao and the cultural revolution. Can you give me some informative links?
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Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 2:36 pm
A rather decent--if occasionally confused--outline of the Cultural Revolution can be found in the Marxists.org online encyclopedia.
This is what it has to say:
In September 1965, Mao’s closest associate, army leader Lin Biao, made a speech urging school pupils to criticise ‘bourgeois liberalism and Khrushchevism’. In the frenetic campaign which ensued, the cult of Mao was elevated to a pitch surpassing even Stalin’s cult. The youth particularly were mobilised against any and all tendencies towards independent thought or action in every sphere of Chinese life. All cultural, scientific and educational work was paralysed. Production plummeted as workers spent long sessions in the study of Mao’s ‘thoughts’.
The “Cultural Revolution” was aimed at smashing the Chinese Communist Party, and re-building an administration owing allegiance to Mao alone. The politically uneducated youth and the peasants were used as a battering ram against the Party that had made the Revolution. Prime targets of the campaign were Liu Shaoqi, the head of state from 1959 (accused of the ‘heresy’ of asserting the primacy of the working class, rather than the peasantry), and General Secretary of the Party, Deng Xiaoping.
In the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, the urban youth were mobilised against the intelligentsia and better-off or educated sections of the working class. To this end, Mao appealed to the loyalty of the youth to the Revolution, and taught the youth to regard all manifestations of culture as bourgeois and counter-revolutionary. Lessons were stopped, all entertainment and social life other than ‘politics’ denounced, and ‘politics’ reduced to mindless repetition of ‘Mao’s Thoughts’ and the witch-hunting of anyone unwilling or unable to reduce themselves to the same idiotic level.
In the second phase of the Cultural Revolution, the atomised and terrorised population was mobilised against the Party. In December 1966, Mao declared that the ‘bourgeois headquarters’ was in the top leadership of the Party itself, and called on the population itself to overthrow the Party administration in their area. By-passing the Party apparatus in this way (something Stalin never dared do), Mao had no mechanism for controlling or directing the “revolution”. As a result, in all areas of the country, rival groups claimed the mantle, and launched holy war, not only against the “capitalist-roaders” – generally the best elements of the Party – but against each other. China degenerated into the chaos of factional fighting which the Revolution had only just succeeded in overcoming.
The means of Mao’s war against the Party was quite different from Stalin’s. Mao mobilised the general population rather than the secret police as the weapon of terror. Torture and murder were carried out quite publicly, by the public, and were supplemented by very effective social control through the eyes and ears of a thousand million neighbours, friends and family members.
Only four of the seventeen members of the 1956 Politburo survived to the Ninth Congress in April 1969 – Mao himself, his acolyte Lin Biao, the pragmatic and revered Zhou Enlai and Li Xiannian.
In the third phase of the Cultural Revolution, Mao faced again the objective fact that his policy had brought the country to the brink of destruction. Some way had to be found to halt the disintegration. To this end, the urban youth which were out of control in the cities were broken up into small groups and sent to the countryside to “learn from the peasants”. Just at a time when Soviet scientists were beginning to catch up for lost decades during which genetics, cybernetics, information technology, relativity and quantum physics were ideological no-go areas, China went all out for Lysenko-ism. Peasants lectured agricultural scientists instead of the other way round.
Scattered around to vast hinterland of China, put to manual work under back-breaking and primitive conditions, under the control of the conservative Chinese peasantry, they were kept out of harm’s way, while the surviving Party apparatus was given limited “rehabilitation” to get the cities back into working order.
From early in 1969, still under Mao’s leadership, China began to take a rightward course in its foreign policy. The People’s Republic of China was admitted to the UN October 1971. ‘Ping-pong diplomacy’ – beginning with an exchange of ping-pong teams – opened up contact with the US, and Nixon visited China in February 1972, and every new diplomatic contact or trade agreement was now hailed as a ‘victory’ along the road to ‘Socialism’.
The Cultural Revolution did not really end until Mao’s death in September 1976, although from 1971 onwards there was a gradual return to ‘normality’. Less than a month after Mao’s death, Mao’s wife Jiang Jing, and the other members of the “Gang of Four”, who had led the Cultural Revolution against the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese working class, were denounced as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and jailed indefinitely.
So discredited were the slogans of the ‘cultural revolution’ that in a short time the ‘capitalist roaders’, most notably Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping, rapidly consolidated their power. Deng Xiaoping was eventually to succeed in taking Chinese Stalinism over to the policy of the restoration of capitalism under the political control of the Communist Party.
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Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 2:42 pm
So yeah, they are correct to criticise Mao, the PRC, the CCP and the Cultural Revolution, just as they would be correct to criticise the SU, CPSU and the purges. The problem is that they criticise from the right. We must explain how these things are the result of Stalinism, which is itself caused by the very backward conditions of these countries and the defeat of the revolution internationally.
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Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 5:22 pm
Louis-Auguste Robespierre these things are the result of Stalinism No true Scotsman fallacies might work on random non-political students, yes.
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Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 6:31 pm
The Curse Louis-Auguste Robespierre these things are the result of Stalinism No true Scotsman fallacies might work on random non-political students, yes. 'No true scotsman's' a specific variety of goalposting whereby objectionable data is dismissed through narrowing a definition. There is no goalposting involved, as Marxists have used a very specific vocabulary and terminology from late 1800's. As such, it is the mark of a non-Marxist or a revisionist to change the definitions, and thus only through such deviations can goalposting or any variant actually occur. Nice try though.
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Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 7:52 pm
Louis-Auguste Robespierre The Curse Louis-Auguste Robespierre these things are the result of Stalinism No true Scotsman fallacies might work on random non-political students, yes. 'No true scotsman's' a specific variety of goalposting whereby objectionable data is dismissed through narrowing a definition. There is no goalposting involved, as Marxists have used a very specific vocabulary and terminology from late 1800's. As such, it is the mark of a non-Marxist or a revisionist to change the definitions, and thus only through such deviations can goalposting or any variant actually occur. Nice try though. So what you're saying is... No true Marxist would commit a no true Scotsman fallacy? Oh-ho-ho.
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Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 8:12 pm
The Curse Louis-Auguste Robespierre The Curse Louis-Auguste Robespierre these things are the result of Stalinism No true Scotsman fallacies might work on random non-political students, yes. 'No true scotsman's' a specific variety of goalposting whereby objectionable data is dismissed through narrowing a definition. There is no goalposting involved, as Marxists have used a very specific vocabulary and terminology from late 1800's. As such, it is the mark of a non-Marxist or a revisionist to change the definitions, and thus only through such deviations can goalposting or any variant actually occur. Nice try though. So what you're saying is... No true Marxist would commit a no true Scotsman fallacy? Oh-ho-ho. Actually, due to the rather precise vocabulary involved, it is not that 'no true' Marxist would, but that 'no true' Marxist could. It is just like how water at 'normal' pressure cannot remain liquid at 100*c. It cannot do such because the moment it crosses over to 100*c, it becomes a vapor. Or are you going to say that that is a no-true-Scotsman fallacy as well?
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Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 12:19 am
Louis-Auguste Robespierre The Curse Louis-Auguste Robespierre The Curse Louis-Auguste Robespierre these things are the result of Stalinism No true Scotsman fallacies might work on random non-political students, yes. 'No true scotsman's' a specific variety of goalposting whereby objectionable data is dismissed through narrowing a definition. There is no goalposting involved, as Marxists have used a very specific vocabulary and terminology from late 1800's. As such, it is the mark of a non-Marxist or a revisionist to change the definitions, and thus only through such deviations can goalposting or any variant actually occur. Nice try though. So what you're saying is... No true Marxist would commit a no true Scotsman fallacy? Oh-ho-ho. Actually, due to the rather precise vocabulary involved, it is not that 'no true' Marxist would, but that 'no true' Marxist could. It is just like how water at 'normal' pressure cannot remain liquid at 100*c. It cannot do such because the moment it crosses over to 100*c, it becomes a vapor. Or are you going to say that that is a no-true-Scotsman fallacy as well? Your arbitrary metaphor makes no sense. A Marxist is no scientific entity that has scientific results. Any claim that 'No true Marxist' would identify Stalin's USSR with communism is claptrap.
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Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 1:40 am
No, you are a 'clap' trap. And I would prefer if you didnt try to spread such around here..
But I like the way you just did exactly what I did, except when I do it it is 'no true scotsman'...
lol.
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Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 1:53 am
Louis-Auguste Robespierre No, you are a 'clap' trap. And I would prefer if you didnt try to spread such around here.. But I like the way you just did exactly what I did, except when I do it it is 'no true scotsman'... lol. If you're talking about the science analogy then no, because physical objects can't possess 'Marxism' or be 'Marxists' only social players, IE, people. Social 'Science' isn't solid or based on simple cause-effect results. Two people of the same ideology don't always agree. In other words, people are individuals. That's more or less why you're committing a No True Scotsman. Also, I somehow doubt you're at risk of catching the clap off me you ol' dog you.
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Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 5:18 am
The Curse Louis-Auguste Robespierre No, you are a 'clap' trap. And I would prefer if you didnt try to spread such around here.. But I like the way you just did exactly what I did, except when I do it it is 'no true scotsman'... lol. If you're talking about the science analogy then no, because physical objects can't possess 'Marxism' or be 'Marxists' only social players, IE, people. Social 'Science' isn't solid or based on simple cause-effect results. Two people of the same ideology don't always agree. In other words, people are individuals. That's more or less why you're committing a No True Scotsman. Also, I somehow doubt you're at risk of catching the clap off me you ol' dog you. Well couldnt that be because the Social sciences are deeply rooted in Humanist ideology? Thus why philosophy's like Determinism and Behaviorism cannot be expounded upon?
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Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 5:18 am
The Curse Louis-Auguste Robespierre No, you are a 'clap' trap. And I would prefer if you didnt try to spread such around here.. But I like the way you just did exactly what I did, except when I do it it is 'no true scotsman'... lol. If you're talking about the science analogy then no, because physical objects can't possess 'Marxism' or be 'Marxists' only social players, IE, people. Social 'Science' isn't solid or based on simple cause-effect results. Two people of the same ideology don't always agree. In other words, people are individuals. That's more or less why you're committing a No True Scotsman. Also, I somehow doubt you're at risk of catching the clap off me you ol' dog you. Well couldnt that be because the Social sciences are deeply rooted in Humanist ideology? Thus why philosophy's like Determinism and Behaviorism cannot be expounded upon? also even cogintive psychology has a degree of Determinist mentality.
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Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 12:07 pm
The Curse Louis-Auguste Robespierre No, you are a 'clap' trap. And I would prefer if you didnt try to spread such around here.. But I like the way you just did exactly what I did, except when I do it it is 'no true scotsman'... lol. If you're talking about the science analogy then no, because physical objects can't possess 'Marxism' or be 'Marxists' only social players, IE, people. Social 'Science' isn't solid or based on simple cause-effect results. Two people of the same ideology don't always agree. In other words, people are individuals. That's more or less why you're committing a No True Scotsman. Also, I somehow doubt you're at risk of catching the clap off me you ol' dog you. Your argument fails. Water has a given set of properties, in this case we will use its the elements: H^20. Marxism has a given set of properties, namely, dialectical method and certain political positions. If the properties of water were to change, say, to H^2O^2 or H^2C then... it IS NOT WATER. Rather simple, no? If the propertiest of a Marxist were to change, from one method and set of political positions to another, then... THEY ARE NOT MARXIST. And while I might be very good at avoiding diseases, I don't want to risk it. Stay the ******** away from me. You should prolly tell the wife-to-be as well.
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