Thread: Does Communism still have a role to play, or is it dead?

This is pretty interesting, I have a bit of catching up to do on this thread.

But in the meantime, can I just ask something? Did the USSR "admit" to being a "dictatorship of the proletariat" per Marx' writings, or not?
Or did it not consider itself to be a dictatorship...? I mea, since there were actual elections in the USSR as far as I am aware.

Originally Posted by Hanna

I mea, since there were actual elections in the USSR as far as I am aware.

That's interesting
Where did you find this info, Hanna?

Originally Posted by Doomer

That's interesting
Where did you find this info, Hanna?

I don't know, I just remember hearing, back in those days that there WERE elections in Eastern Europe, just some restrictions as to what people could vote for. I.e. different shades of red, probably (???) And hearing about it on the news in my childhood. I.e. "In elections in the DDR, votes have been counted and 98% voted for the Communist party and Erich Honecker, the remainder voted for Socialist workers party"
And thinking - what is the point of having elections under such circumstances?

No doubt there were many people who DID believe in communism and were quite happy to vote for it. But there must have been plenty of people who preferred to vote for something else and considered the who thing silly and insulting.

Originally Posted by Hanna

This is pretty interesting, I have a bit of catching up to do on this thread.

But in the meantime, can I just ask something? Did the USSR "admit" to being a "dictatorship of the proletariat" per Marx' writings, or not?
Or did it not consider itself to be a dictatorship...? I mea, since there were actual elections in the USSR as far as I am aware.

At the end, certainly not. It considered itself a real democracy. Since 1936 everyone had equal rights, including the "former".

Originally Posted by Hanna

This is pretty interesting, I have a bit of catching up to do on this thread.

But in the meantime, can I just ask something? Did the USSR "admit" to being a "dictatorship of the proletariat" per Marx' writings, or not?
Or did it not consider itself to be a dictatorship...? I mea, since there were actual elections in the USSR as far as I am aware.

Well, they claimed that perfect society should not contain exploiter class at all. All people should be "the proletariat, the peasantry and the working intelligentsia" (which form one class) and there are no place to parasite classes in our society. In the time of Lenin-Stalin they say that if there are some parasite people, they should be caught and reforged into "the proletariat etc..." in special camps or killed if they don't want to be reforged. Later it was said that reforging is mainly succeeded and now very few remaining parasites will be reforged by themselves as a natural historical process.

So it was positioned as a dictatorship of everybody, not of some class or separate persons. The same propaganda as of democracy TM but in other words.