Communism Is as Socialism Does (and Vice Versa)

 

They argue and split hairs, they fight and break heads, they work together and destroy liberty because they all travel to the same soul-crushing destination. As far as liberty-loving anti-communists are concerned, communists and socialists — and “democractic socialists,” Fabians, progressives, Alinskyites (not to mention most Democrats and an awful lot of Republicans), etc. — believe in the same centrally planned, varyingly totalitarian vision for America that the founding fathers would have had to declare independence from all over again.

To that point of ideological convergence, a couple of quotations

What Is Cultural Marxism?

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The term “cultural Marxism” has gained traction in recent years, usually employed pejoratively against young leftists and Social Justice Warrior ideologues. Like any such political pejorative, including those used by both the left and the right, the common rejoinder is that, by the overuse of the term, it has either been rendered meaningless or has always been without meaning.

But “cultural Marxism” is a term that has real meaning, and not necessarily a pejorative meaning (that would presumably depend on your own ideological preferences). The idea of cultural Marxism is derived from Marx’s theory of history as it evolved through the discipline of history by Marxist historians as they gradually became less orthodox.

Lenin: Crush, Smash the Police

In The State and Revolution, V. I. Lenin elaborates on Marx’s demonic ravings about a violent revolution to create a state of “armed workers” that will itself “begin to wither away.” Madness. Beginning with the first Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union under Lenin, all such revolutions have only created monstrous dictatorships, which, far from withering away, have slaughtered millions and millions of their own and other peoples all over Planet Earth.

Did five more die in Dallas last night?

Lenin saw police as the front line of the enemy — the enemy, of course, being existing society, which had to be destroyed.

…at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism — the proletariat — and enables it to crush, smash to smithereens, wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine — the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy — and to substitute for it a more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape of the armed masses of workers who develop into a militia in which the entire population takes part.

Blackwater.ru: The Future of Russian Private Military Companies

In Soviet times, Russian military professionals worked across the globe from Cuba to Vietnam, teaching, advising and sometimes just pointing Kalashnikov muzzles at the enemy for the sake of the proletariat.

Now Russian authorities want them to do so again, but this time, for profit — and, just possibly, as a governmental proxy.

A bill filed with the State Duma late last month would legalize private military and security companies (PMSCs) in Russia, an idea endorsed in 2012 by President Vladimir Putin.

Why America’s poisonous politics makes ‘Market Leninism’ an attractive alternative

“Market Leninism” has become the biggest challenge to our society, writes John Avlon. And the problem with this alternative to Western governance is that it promises prosperity at the expense of individual freedom – while dismissing democracy as ineffective

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The ideology of communism may have ended up on the ash heap of history like Nazism before it, but now “Market Leninism” is taking its place as a challenge to liberty in the 21st Century.

The fault lines reflect Cold War regions.

Russia and China and some of their old satellite states have traded Marx and Lenin for Market Leninism.