The spectacle was something I'll never forget, though perhaps not for the reasons Mr. Huk and his countrymen intended. The show was so precise as to be robotic. No one outside the group, everyone buried within it. All done with a flair and focus that was chilling to behold. The model of mass unity that was being held up as proof of greatness and independence smacked of mindlessness. Of course everyone in the performance was human, with their own hopes, dreams and desires. This though was something to be eliminated, not tolerated or encouraged. These were things that still had to be rooted out in an effort to build the utopian, Juche-centered society. The zeal in Mr. Huk's voice spoke not of a country, but of a cult.
(via Reenhead)
North Korea was never a socialist state, nor was the USSR from the day the Bolshevik Party was swamped with middle-class professionals and OLD TSARIST OFFICIALS. This happened because there was no revolution in an industrialised country that had a working class able to control and run the country's industries independent of the ruling class parasites who benefit from super-exploiting workers and the environment. What we need is genuine, international socialism, with no compromise with any ruling class, but rather a desire to overthrow all the capitalists so that we can eliminate the super-rich corporate executives. The elimination of corporate executives and of profit will allow planning where the needs of people and the environment come first and where increasing the obscene profits of millionaires is NEVER the question. That is what socialism is all about, not a bureaucratic totalitarian state like Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Yugoslavia or North Korea.
North Korea was never a socialist state, nor was the USSR from the day the Bolshevik Party was swamped with middle-class professionals and OLD TSARIST OFFICIALS. This happened because there was no revolution in an industrialised country that had a working class able to control and run the country's industries independent of the ruling class parasites who benefit from super-exploiting workers and the environment. What we need is genuine, international socialism, with no compromise with any ruling class, but rather a desire to overthrow all the capitalists so that we can eliminate the super-rich corporate executives. The elimination of corporate executives and of profit will allow planning where the needs of people and the environment come first and where increasing the obscene profits of millionaires is NEVER the question. That is what socialism is all about, not a bureaucratic totalitarian state like Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Yugoslavia or North Korea.
Interesting. (a) What's your view on Cuba? Worker's paradise sabotaged by American sanctions, or just as bad as the others? and (b) how do you propose to square socialism with human nature, or do you believe the neo-Marxist view that there is no such thing as human nature and everything is conditioned?
"(...) What we need is genuine, international socialism (...)"
There are a number of 'wands of wishing' deep in the dungeons of Gehenomm. Go look. http://www.nethack.org/
Karl Marx claimed that a socialist revolution had to occur in an ADVANCED, INDUSTRIALISED, IMPERIALIST nation for it to succeed. He was right, because it is only the experience of the working classes in those countries that makes workers' control of the means of production and all the benefits in terms of rational planning to meet the needs of people and the environment rather than planning to meet the obscene profits of a tiny minority possible.
When such a revolution does not occur, the ruling classes of the imperialist countries will inevitably use force to regain control of any backward country in which a revolution might occur. This was why the Russian Civil War killed so many people, and when the ESSENTIAL revolution in Germany failed, Russia succumbed to a counter-revolution led by Stalin, middle-class professionals and old tsarist officials who had joined the Bolsheviks after the Civil War.
Had there been a revolution in Germany, we would not be seeing such environmental disasters as the drying
The problem with Marxists and neo-Marxists of pretty much every stripe is that they believe that there is no such thing as human nature and that human behaviour is 100% caused by environmental conditioning, and consequently ignore the problem of whether such a utopia is sustainable. The other problem is orthodox Marxism (like Christian Fundamentalism or a comprehensive conspiracy theory) is a closed belief system impervious to disproof, at least in the hands of a lot of its believers. If reality contradicts scripture, reality is at fault, and there is certainly some quote from Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Guevara, Hoxha or whoever which can be used to hand-wave around it, or some categorical distinction from Marxist theory which can be applied to get results that make
sense.
There was a good article in the Onion recently about the state of affairs in a Marxist student share-house demonstrating the failure of Marxist economics. Of course, your average true believer would just hand-wave away such demonstrat
what was the reasons for the russian civil war?
http://www.house.gov/international_relations/lee0502.htm thirteen years in the life of sun-ok lee http://www.plastic.com/article.html?sid=02/10/16/21540652 [via plastic]