202 posted on 7/9/02 10:59 AM Pacific by commieprof
Democratic Socialism is nothing more than the foundation to Anarchy.
You a Trotskyite? In addition to being a feminist and deconstructionist? How precious!! I read a lot of that silly utopian leftist stuff years ago so really you are giving me nothing new. What I don't like is how you leftist bums and unemployables have hijacked so many universities and made them into places where you can somehow get on the payroll and leech off the taxpayers. In your case Texas.
I also think that it was very courageous of you to post here. Most of the time liberals/socialists/communists just come in here, get confronted with the facts, then call names and run away. But to get to my point...
You mention your challenge of "new ideas and information". But your ideas are nothing new. Communism was responsible for the slaughter of 100 million people over the last century. It does not work, Maoist, Trotskyist, whateverist, it is a system that fails every time it is tried, except for bees and ants, which another FReeper has already stated. You claim your compassion and admiration for the common man. Do you really wish to show this compassion and admiration by treating human beings like insects? Your predecessors have done exactly that, and their kill rates rival those of chemical insecticides that we use in our homes and gardens against insects.
Just wondering...JFK
Snip......
In vast areas of the planet capitalism has been overthrown, whilst to preserve it elsewhere has cost the lives of tens and even hundreds of millions in localised and world wars; famine continues to claim countless victims in a world where food "surpluses" are burned.
This testifies to the fact that capitalism has long passed from the early phase of its development, when it was a relatively progressive system, to its terminal phase when it has become absolutely reactionary--in short to the epoch in which its death agony takes place.
The question that faces humanity is whether imperialism will drag all classes into a common ruin or whether the working class can lead the exploited and oppressed into a new social order; one where democratically planned production for need based upon common ownership opens up the prospect of a classless, stateless world. The objective pre-requisites for this have long existed: technology, science, the means of production and a multi-millioned world proletariat.
Twice this century, in 1914-23 and 1939-47, capitalism has been thrown into such acute worldwide convulsions that it stared death in the face. Twice, its own rivalries and contradictions have raised up the spectre of its global defeat at the hands of the proletariat. On countless other occasions the proletariat of individual countries has sought to settle accounts decisively with its exploiters.
But, as yet, it has not found, or been able to preserve, a leadership capable of completing the task of the world revolution. Before 1914 the Socialist International did assemble a mass-based world movement of the working class, but this suffered degeneration and betrayal before it could create the centralised leadership necessary for victory in the approaching revolutionary crises.
....snip
I'll bet hopes were high when Slick Willy won in 92
I haven't read anything by or about Trotsky that would convince me that there is much difference between him and Stalin, shades of red so to speak.
If he had taken power he might have killed marginally fewer people, but judging from his proformance during the Russian Civil War, not many.
Somebody in my family, very particularly, refers to himself as a Trotskyite.