Talk:Communism

Article Checklist for "Communism"

Workgroup category or categories	Politics Workgroup, History Workgroup, Economics Workgroup [Editors asked to check categories]
Article status	Developing article: beyond a stub, but incomplete
Underlinked article?	Yes
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	John Stephenson 02:32, 15 May 2007 (CDT)

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Seeing as Ed Poor had stopped working on stuff a few hours ago, I've put up a skeleton on which to flesh out an article. I'll have sources for my claims, though most of them are widely-known and uncontroversial, except to Communists. But this is a huge topic, and what I've started is probably less than 10% of what should be in this article. ...said Anthony Argyriou (talk) (Please sign your talk page posts by simply adding four tildes, ~~~~.)

Lumping all communist regimes together?

The tone of this article seems to lump together every communist government, from hardline regimes of yesteryear to modern states - as though they're all in it together to kill as many as possible (e.g. "..countries which came under Communist rule"). While not disputing the massacres that have taken place under regimes practicing communism, I think the article needs to make some distinctions over how much is actually linked to the pursuit of communism and how much has more in common with dictatorship, authoritarianism etc. generally. Also, perhaps it shouldn't accept at face value sources such as the Black Book of Communism, which has been favourably reviewed in the Western press but remains a tome many on the far left have criticised. But I'm not an expert so I don't plan to edit this page; just wanted to signal a note or two of caution. John Stephenson 03:48, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

As I unpack my books, I'll work on getting better references. The Black Book was justifiably criticized for trying to get a round 100 million, but other scholarly sources have estimated Communism's death toll at between 60 million and 120 million. Far-left critique of anything criticizing communism is utterly unreliable, as it is clear from the historical record that people on the far left will distort the truth and flat-out lie to defend communism.

The history is very compressed; it needs to be expanded greatly. I've added a section header for the history of Communist states, so that can be kept distinct from the history of communist parties and communist theory. As that section gets filled out, distinctions can be made, such as the difference between the mass liquidations of the collectivization period and the forced famine in Ukraine and the far less deadly Brezhnev period, or between existing Communist states such as Cuba, which doesn't kill very many people and North Korea, which is starving millions.

The "... countries which came under Communist rule" line is worded that way because almost no Communist government came to power via free elections; Communism was imposed at the point of a gun almost everywhere. Anthony Argyriou 10:56, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

Fair enough, but I would add that any right-wing source is unreliable as well; perhaps the article will later distinguish between communism as an ideology which invites totalitarianism and the dictatorships which practiced forms of communism, adding other beliefs such as Stalinism to the mix. John Stephenson 20:51, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

Equating "far-left" sources with all "right-wing" sources is intellectually dishonest, and in the case of study of Communism, counterfactual as well. Most honest reporting of the reality of Communist government and Communist party activity comes from "right-wing" sources, such as Robert Conquest, Jean-Francois Revel, Richard Pipes, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Arthur Koestler, Whittaker Chambers, and Milovan Djilas, among others. Anthony Argyriou 00:22, 30 May 2007 (CDT)

Marx had predecessors

Marx obviously is the biggie, but he had important predecessors such as Saint-Simon. Furthermore, in Russia, Lenin was (is?) regarded along with Marx as one of the great theoreticians of communism. So, strictly speaking, this is an oversimplification:

Communism as a political ideology is derived from the works of Karl Marx, who with Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, setting forth a program for a revolutionary socialist movement.

Maybe "derived especially" or "mainly derived." --Larry Sanger 11:26, 29 May 2007 (CDT)

There should probably be a separate article on non-Marxist communism as a philosophy, as it extended back to ancient Greece, and continued (anemically) after Marx. Marx definitely drew on earlier communist philosophy, but even philosophically, represents a break from that tradition. Within Marxian thought, Lenin is still important as a theoretician. I'll think about how to clean that up today. Anthony Argyriou 14:48, 29 May 2007 (CDT)