Quote:
Originally posted by Strange Famous
At the risk of repeating what the guy already said, there has never been an existing socialist state... Leninism, Maoism, Stalinism, Pol Pot,,, none of this has any relevance to a discussion about socialism. No one has starved death under a socialist system of government, no one has ever been murdered by a socialist government... there are only so many times these truism's can be repeated, before we have to believe that people just do not WANT to understand.
When we talk about socialism, we are not talking about Russia, we are not talking about Cambodia... if you want to talk about the inefficiency of Bresnev's (sic) Russia, or the corruption and mass murder of Stalin's Russia, I will happily agree with you, but these where not socialist states, and neither of them even thought of themselves as Marxists.
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Ditto. But I would say the closest the world came to socialism was in Barcelona during Spain's civil war.
Stalin did not create socialism. He was a Marxist, so be believed that there was some kind of formula to history, and if Russia beat the people with their own stick for long enough, socialism would spontaneously happen.
Yes, Stalin was crazy.
Socialism can really only exist in anarchy. But remember that anarchy doesn't mean chaos; it means that there is no nation, and power structures do not reach beyond local councils. (The nation-state idea was mostly a european invention.)
Bill Hicks: "Now I'm no bleeding heart, okay? But, when you're walking down the streets of New York City and you're stepping over a guy on the sidewalk who, I don't know, might be dead...does it ever occur to you to think 'Wow, maybe our system doesn't work?' Does that thought ever bubble up out of you?"