Communism = Faith-based ideology?
Offline Natural said in this thread:
http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/the_rational_response_squad_radio_show/freethinking_anonymous/10123
Try to be creative, try to indirectly debate the foundations of religion (faith, dogma, etc.) without calling it 'religion'. You could debate psychics or homeopathy or some other topic worthy of the show 'Bullshit!' Alien visitations, or whatever. You can always make subtle hints that they are the same as religion. Or debate communism vs. democracy and show that communism is a faith-based ideology and that faith-based ideologies are universally without merit.
I've never really thought of communism in this way. Maybe it is because I am not super familiar with communism.
My room-mate is a communist-atheist-conspiracy theorist. he drives me crazy because his atheism is rational, his conspiracy theories are not, and he is the most hypocritical communist I have ever met (he does the absolute last amount of chores possible to keep us from kicking him out of the house, gets offended when we ask him to help out more, hold everyone to higher standards than himself, etc)
So, next time I hear him going on and on about how great communism is, I would love to have some fuel to point out that communism is a faith-based idiology. that would really get his blood moving, LOL
Bring on the discussion!
Your resident OTD/S, Christina
A good scientist will always change her mind if new evidence is presented which gives her sufficient reason to change it.
www.ziztur.com
- Login to post comments
I've actually read Das Kapital, and its pretty good. Marx is hopelessly idealistic, but very funny.
First of all, we need to understand that a communist nation has never existed. Ever. And never will. Because it does not work. All those nasty communist or ex-communist countries? USSR? China? North Kor? Vietnam? They are all hyperstatist dictatorships.
Secondly, we need to understand that Marx lived in England during the Industrial Revolution, when England was hypercapitalist, and as such there was no regulation on private labour, and being that, (as Marx pointed out) labour is a commodity of a capitalist society, the engine of capitalism can move forward only with the exploitation of the working class.
Anyway, Marx failed to see the rise of the middle class, post-war, and the rise of antitrust and socialist regulation after WWII, and he failed to see that disaster that would be caused by the twisting of his ideas by the statists from 1917 and even up to today (North Korea).
I would not call Marx's communism "faith-based". It is an economic and political doctrine. However, when describing the Statist dictatorships that torqued his ideas, that is different. The phrase you are looking for is cult of personality. And those were very much dogmatic, irrational, faith-based ideologies.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
That is a super reply, anyone who understands communism knows it has never been applied. I see the application being impossible due to the nature of human beings.
Is cult of personality equal to idolatory? If so, it's not too difficult to see how people are persuaded into believing religiously.
What would interest me is a similar statement with the first sentence being "First of all, we need to understand that an athiest nation has never existed", because all too often communism (and fascism) have been wrongly quoted/established as athiest regimes.
I've thought about this quite a bit. While I see deluded's point that communism has never truely been seen I also think that the test of an idea is in it's application but I think the original point is about real-world communism rather than theoretical communism.
I think that the communist states we have seen are indistinguishable from theocracies. They are built on total unquestioning faith in an idea and maintained through the destruction of individuality by extreeme censorship and threats of punnishment for even questioning the ideas or leadership.
Many ideologies work like this, they homogenise a group based on faith in the ideology rather than rationality, probably because it's hard to be totally rational as a human being and in many cases there's no rational reason to hold the same opinion as the next person.
Religion is the obvious one, but I see the same thought processes in extreeme political positions on both the left and the right. Even in extreeme environmental or animal rights groups. People start thinking as a group. The individual is destroyed and only conformity remains.
we are probably wired to be susceptible to this kind of thought because, until our recent history, conformity was important to our survival. Everyone in the tribe should have the same ideas of right and wrong and share the group's goals. Now it seems to be doing more harm than good.
Oh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr. I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!
In the immortal words of Homer J. Simpson: "Marge, I agree with you - in theory. In theory, Communism works. In theory."
I've been into communism and anarchism for awhile now. I'm about to start taking poly sci courses and one of them is political ideologies.
Communism CAN be faith based and dogmatic, but it can also be useful. I'm way more into anarchist ideas because communism focuses on a workers revolution through a centralized proletarian dictatorship, whereas anarchism is focused on a DEcentralized social revolution. It actually is very well grounded in social science and theory. I really don't like to waste too much time with it though for reasons I will explain in a second.
Noam Chomsky always says action should keep in mind a social model of the future, and we should continually focus on one that maximizes the possibility of our true human potential and human nature. He refers to libertarian socialism/anarcho-syndicalism.
We have to detect and identify forms of authority and coercion to see if they are legitimate. Most of them time they are almost always illegitimate and should be dismantled.
If there is one thing I have learned about with ideologies and political theory it is this: they are counter-revolutionary! We have all of these marxists, leninists, anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-primitivists, left libertarians, right libertarians, you name it- all duking it out and arguing with each other about how the world should be and we have 3 pissed off radicals out in the streets taking it on. The action in this country is so divided.
I prefer to just call myself a pragmatic progressive. I look for what I can effect. We have to help the poor and organize them for power. Pure and simple, period.
There is a great book i'm reading by the legendary community organizer Saul Alinksy called "Rules For Radicals." It's really good and he talks about communism in it. It was written in like 1971 when things were out of control and he mainly criticized the counter-productivity of the anti-establishment and counter-culture movements.
He says "They have no illusions about the state of the world, but plenty of illusions on how to change it."
So yeah communism or anarchism can be faith based and dogmatic, or it can provide a rational analysis of this controlled and highly indoctrinated society we grow up in.
I've learned that it is most dogmatic when you have all of these anarchists and communists not partaking in any action, but simply just trying to educate people on their theories. All that is is spreading ideas, like the christians do. It is counter-revolutionary because it is doing nothing for challenging the structure of power.
I say we just need to raise some hell! We just need a series of gradations. Slowley but surely challenging power and waking people up. I think if anything is faith based and dogmatic it is capitalism, but I abide by this faith because there is no other option. We have to take small steps and build a more sane capitalism, because there is no serious potential for a social revolution.
I think educating people on critical thinking and responsible consumption is a crucial thing people need to pay attention. Get them to learn about fair trade, to start looking at the independent media. When they see the causes and reasons for them, things will click. No one wants to be stupid, but they will if they are mosing around like cattle.
"Every true faith is infallible -- It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it. But it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search." - Nietzsche
Another thing alinsky points out is that revolutions are indeed always triggered by ideologies. However, the problem is that people take these ideologies and mold them into dogmas.
Different ends justify different means. If you were looking for action as a german during ww2, you would have been resorting to utter terror, sabotage, assasination. Different things work differently according to the context of their times in history.
Ghandi may have well used violence and guns the traditional way during those times if they had the m and the people were motivated to do so.
Then you have all of these morons taking this non-violent idea as a form of action, and they mold it into this idea that it is the only way to take action!
So again I would like to say that marx's critique of capitalism is completely pure, the problem with the communists and anarchists is mainly when they step in and say what we should do about it.
It's like saying you believe in world peace. Well yeah, but how do you get to that? We ought to live in a classeless, stateless, egalitarian society - based on direct democracy and an equal share of power.
It's 2007, read a book on current issues and take them on. Put down the communist manifesto and pick up a brick... or a flower?
"Every true faith is infallible -- It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it. But it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search." - Nietzsche
That's not hypocritical communism, that's *communism*!! I lived in Prague for 4 years, and there are still many echoes of communistic thinking there; being lazy and shirking responsibility is par for the course.
The faith of communism derives from dialectics and Marx's funny view of history (can't remember what it was called). Dialectical thinking is an intuitive, non-rational way of thinking. It can be useful and give some cool insights into topics you wouldn't expect, but if you take your insights as truth without evidence, then that's faith my friend.
Wonderist on Facebook — Support the idea of wonderism by 'liking' the Wonderism page — or join the open Wonderism group to take part in the discussion!
Gnu Atheism Facebook group — All gnu-friendly RRS members welcome (including Luminon!) — Try something gnu!
I'd call dialectical materialisms pretty 'faith based'... it was warmed over Hegelianism... but otherwise I agree with your assessment.
Are you referring to 'historical materialism', Natural? Marx seems to borrow, slightly, from Comte here....
"Hitler burned people like Anne Frank, for that we call him evil.
"God" burns Anne Frank eternally. For that, theists call him 'good.'
That's right, todangst. I never formally studied Marx or communism. I'm just going off of what I learned from sources like Wikipedia. I did sort of pick up on dialetics separately, and know more about that from personal experience.
Wonderist on Facebook — Support the idea of wonderism by 'liking' the Wonderism page — or join the open Wonderism group to take part in the discussion!
Gnu Atheism Facebook group — All gnu-friendly RRS members welcome (including Luminon!) — Try something gnu!
Of course. Anyone who makes this fallacy of conflation leaves themselves open to a reduction to the absurd specially coined reductio ad Hitlerum. A pity I do not get to use this phrase more often. The fallacy of conflation also ignores the fact that fascism is nearly impossible to define, and is often regarded as myriad of opportunistic dictatorships, sometimes right wing, sometimes left, with very loosely defined characteristics all seeimgly bound together by their hatred of the democratic process. This does not necessitate religioisty of lack of it in much the same way that telephones do not necessitate "carrots". Imperialist Japan c 1930-1945 was a quasi-religious theocratic junta and is often regarded as the most brutal and controlling of the post-WWI fascist states.
Since the ultraleft wing dictatorships were not communist in any sense of the word whatsoever except that it was incorporated into the name of the state, many historians regard China, Russia, etc as fascist (which should give you a rough idea of how broad the term is). However, some others have argued that fascism is inherently and instrically tied to large conglomerates and right-wing elites for support, while the left wing dictatorships are marked by a state monopoly on dominance and control (hence the term hyperstatist).
We also need to understand the reasons that Marx called religion the opiate of the masses. If we examine the hypercapitalist societies of the time, there were two classes, the ruling elite and the exploited working class. Being that the working class were treated like commodities by the capitalist society (what Marx called abstract labour), religion was often utilized to keep the masses in check and prevent social unrest. In countries of large geographic distribution, the church was often the means of communication of the state to the masses (and hence in captialist societies was often an arm of the state). Religion was utilized to keep down the flames of rebellion and employed as form of indoctrination in order to keep the nation stable. This was especially true in Russia due to its large size, but also in Germany, (not so much France due to its post-revolution secular ideas), and Britain.
But in Marx's communist utopia, there would be no state or corporation to terrorize the free people and keep them enslaved, hence religion would simply fall away like a necroted hand.
The hyperstatist dictatorships which bastardized Marx's ideas destroyed religion for a different reason- they wished to replace it with only one God, that of the state, and the cult of personality revolving around a supreme overlord, be it Stalin, Mao, Lenin etc. it is remarkable that all of these nations followed exactly this pattern to the letter. Due to the nature of Marx's doctrine, in the abscene of any other controlling factor, the working class did not organize into a free utopia, but rather no one ever got past stage #3 of Marx's glorious revolution (the socialist dictatorship and the revolt of the working classes against the opressors of capitalism). The problem is that people are self-interested and dislike giving up power, so the state, which, in the absence of controlling factors, swelled to an Orwellian Leviathan, simply took Marx's "struggle of the proletariat" to mean "kill anyone who we dislike". This is why the body count in these nation was so high.
Regardless, the point I am trying to make is that equivocating communism (or hyperstatism, which is what people usually mean when they say this) or fascism with atheism is like equivocating "hello" with "cucumber".
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Deludedgod, long time no talk! I forgot about this forum for awhile and now I'm back. It's nice to see that you are still here filling up the forum with your well thought out research.
"Every true faith is infallible -- It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it. But it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then search." - Nietzsche
thank you
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Communism works just fine in Star Trek, where people work just to fulfill themselves. Perhaps because they have no choice. Replicators can give them anything they want, so working to buy more stuff is out of the question. Everyone enjoys the same commodities. No one is starving. Everyone is happy. Praise the Federation and thank whoever invented Warp Drive.
But in the real world, communism was a doctrine that went against human nature. Why would I want to study medicine or engineering, or anything else, if I know I will be as underpaid as any layman? The doctrine killed ambition, pride, greed, anything that can keep a capitalist economy going. That was the point, but no state can progress if the citizens lack motivation.
One of the worst things about communism is that it became every theist's best defense against atheism. But atheism wasn't the problem here. Communists saw Marx's ideas as the only path to salvation, but those who took power and followed Marx's philosophy never truly created Marxist states but cults of personalities. This is no different than what the Vatican has been doing for centuries using the name of Jesus.
Marxism may have despised religions, but teaching kids to thank uncle Stalin for every meal was as religious as someone could get. Communism was like a Catholic theocracy with Stalin replacing Jesus, and the state replacing the Vatican.