What really happens in reality is the test of every idea that people have about reality. I don't subscribe to the superstition of scientism which makes scientific method the test of everything - by the way, neither do the true believers in scientism, they're some of the worst violators of it, though that's for later - but that is the alleged gold standard of all scientific theories, that all theories, eventually, will stand or fall on the observation of physical objects to discern their composition, their forms, the forces that act on them and we can only discern from their OBSERVED effects on physical objects.
Marx and Engels and all the other theorists of communism sold their theories as being scientific in nature, as did the Nazis and fascists and many and various other ideologies that arose after the 17th century when science arose and became the most glamorous of intellectual framings. That means that when those theories are tested anyone looking at their claims has every right to judge them by the results, those who promote those theories as some aspect of science HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO JUDGE THE THEORIES ON THEIR OBSERVED RESULTS WHEN THEY ARE APPLIED.
The most salient fact of the application of Marx's theories of better governance is the fact that they have produced scores of millions of murders by the state and the state apparatus, the total and complete suppression of freedom, terror against the citizens of those countries, either of a low grade in which that terror took a general anxiety of surveillance and arrest, the witnessing of such arrests for what was said that did or might be construed to be against the ruling elite, or it might take the form it has during reigns of terror where public execution is witnessed regularly, in the cases of things like Mao's Cultural Revolution or the rule of the Kim dynasty in North Korea where they require grade school aged children to witness people being shot up on a regular basis - and that is those who aren't part of the massive, hereditary class of enslaved helots maintained by those governments.
It will be argued that it's unfair to note this because pure, clean Marxism has never been tried, as it can be argued that pure Christianity has never been tried. But the case that Christianity hasn't been tried is a lot better than that Marxism hasn't. You can easily point to the central commandments and claims of Jesus, the words of Paul and James and the others who defined the basis of Christianity in the Second Testament and prove that even the rule of Popes and "Christian Majesties(the very term is a self-contradiction) have repeatedly violated those basic principles of Christianity. I think the case that Marxist mass murder and suppression of rights is some violation of the gospel of Marx can't be sustained in a similar way. He envisioned communism, not in terms of democracy but in terms of a dictatorship allegedly of the working class, in itself an absurd idea. Dictatorships inevitably end up with a ruling criminal class elite, that is the observed nature of dictatorships.
I am not ashamed in my old age to have done what I should have done from the time I became aware of the nature of communism as it really is in the real world, I'm ashamed that I fell for the obscene notion that, somehow, the mass murders were "good" mass murders or at least to be unmentioned because the economic policy Marx espoused was so much better than that of capitalism. That is one of the most disgusting and obscene lines there is, it is exactly equivalent to fascists and Nazis discounting the murders that those ideologies, applied, inevitably produced in history. It is exactly the equivalent of what Marx saw and criticized in capitalism, the horrific and grinding oppression, the destruction of people and nature that is inherent in it, only on a far more accelerated time frame today from what he saw in the 19th century.
The most useful thing that Marxists in the post-war period had for gulling those who were gullible, as I was, were the anti-communists and their lies and excesses. But despising Red Channels, Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy, HUAC is no excuse for refusing to hold communism responsible for what communist governments did. While HUAC and Joe McCarthy were harassing a bunch of elite communists and their fellows here, depriving some Hollywood crap writers the right to have their names put on their scripts, the chance to earn fat salaries on the movies, and part of what they did that most people remember because, as RMJ pointed out here a while back, Hollywood likes to talk about Hollywood, people were being murdered, terrorized, deprived of every single right in every way by the very governments that the Hollywood 10, Bertold Brecht, Lillian Hellman, Corliss Lamont, etc. were supporting. Later on it was the "new left" of such things as the Maoist Progressive Labor Party who were breaking up the SDS as the Cultural Revolution was murdering millions. They're still romanticized by some older lefty magazine scribblers. And when those governments went after you, you were sent to concentration camps or killed. You know, exactly what Hitler would do to you if you said the wrong thing or were related to the wrong people.
That's what I'm ashamed of, that I fell for that line for a single second. I was never a Marxist or even much tempted to be one, mostly because I knew of those murders and that oppression, partly because I never really bought into the idea that sociology or history could be scientific. I'm ashamed that I was too much of a coward to say these things until I was in my fifties when I realized that someone murdered by communism was as dead and as murdered as someone murdered in a Nazi concentration camp or under the Italian invasion of Ethiopia or in the Japanese invasion of China or the Philippines. They are as dead as those murdered in the invasion and theft of the Americas or Australia, the dead under capitalism, those so casually murdered under the Victorian Poor Law.
Tell me why there is something good about the murders under communism and why the same claims can't be made by those who excuse the murders of fascism, Nazism and capitalism under various claims of biological imperative or, in the case of capitalism "freedom". As can be seen in the devolution of communist countries to mafia terror states, Marx's dictatorships of proletariats turn into such things with remarkable regularity. That's what the experiment run in real life shows. That's because that's what they always were, they just dropped the fancy talk and theory. Though, as in the case of such lefty venues as The Nation and In These Times proves, the old line lefties don't mind doing some of the propaganda work for the successors even as they push the old lines about old communists and communism. I suspect there have been payoffs, in the past and today.
No real left can be built on communism, it turns out to be what anyone should have suspected it would, horrible, grinding capitalist oppression instituted and carried out with more scientific precision and without any recognized moral inhibitions.
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