Communists are not right-wing.
And someone whose username is a lie itself can't be trusted.
Yeah..but Oligarchies are right wing.
Neither China nor Russia was ever communist by definition.
So now to progressives, China and Russia were never communist.
You are fucked up beyond all belief.
Of course they were communist. But they were not socialist.
Socialism is liberal. More people (preferably everyone) have some say in how the economy works. Democracy is liberal. More people (preferably everyone) have some say in how the government works. "Democracy," said Marx, "is the road to socialism." He was wrong about how economics and politics interact, but he did see their similar underpinnings.
Communism is conservative. Fewer and fewer people (preferably just the Party Secretary) have any say in how the economy works. Republicans are conservative. Fewer and fewer people (preferably just people controlling the Party figurehead) have any say in how the government works. The conservatives in the US are in the same position as the communists in the 30s, and for the same reason: Their revolutions failed spectacularly but they refuse to admit what went wrong.
A common mistake is to confuse Socialism, the economic system, with Communism, the political system. Communists are "socialist" in the same way that Republicans are "compassionate conservatives". That is, they give lip service to ideals they have no intention of practicing.
Communism, or "scientific socialism", has very little to do with Marx. Communism was originally envisioned by Marx and Engels as the last stages of their socialist revolution. "The meaning of the word communism shifted after 1917, when Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik Party seized power in Russia. The Bolsheviks changed their name to the Communist Party and installed a repressive, single-party regime devoted to the implementation of socialist policies." (quote from Encarta.). Those socialist policies were never implemented.
Whereas Marx saw industrialized workers rising up to take over control of their means of production, the exact opposite happened. Most countries that have gone Communist have been agrarian underdeveloped nations. The prime example is the Soviet Union. The best thing to be said about the October Revolution in 1917 is that the new government was better than the Tsars. The worst thing is that they trusted the wrong people, notably Lenin, to lead this upheaval.
The Soviet Union officially abandoned socialism in 1921 when Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy allowing for taxation, local trade, some state capitalism... and extreme profiteering. Later that year, he purged 259,000 from the party membership and therefore purged them from voting (shades of the US election of 2000!) and fewer and fewer people were involved in making decisions.
Marxism became Marxist-Leninism which became Stalinism. The Wikipedia entry for Stalinism: "The term Stalinism was used by anti-Soviet Marxists, particularly Trotskyists, to distinguish the policies of the Soviet Union from those they regard as more true to Marxism. Trotskyists argue that the Stalinist USSR was not socialist, but a bureaucratized degenerated workers state that is, a state in which exploitation is controlled by a ruling caste which, while it did not own the means of production and was not a social class in its own right, accrued benefits and privileges at the expense of the working class."
Communists defending Stalin were driven by Cognitive Dissonance. "The existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, motivates the person to reduce the dissonance and leads to avoidance of information likely to increase the dissonance." They didn't want to hear any criticism, and would go out of their way to deny facts. The abrupt betrayal of ideals by Lenin and Marx left many socialists clinging to the Soviet Union even though they knew Stalin was a disaster. They called themselves Communist even though they espoused none of Stalin's viewpoints and very few of Lenin's revisionism. In Russia, Lenin remains a Hero of the Revolution. Despite having screwed things up in the first place, Stalin is revered by Communists for toppling the Third Reich.
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While not all conservatives are authoritarians; all highly authoritarian personalities are political conservatives.
Robert Altmeyer - The Authoritarians
