Click on the headline to link to a New York Times obituary for Irwin Silber, folklorist and ardent Stalinist (under various political figure and organizations).
Markin comment:
If you do not believe that Irwin Silber was an ardent Stalinist then Google and read some of his anti-Trotskyist diatribes in the old Guardian that he helped edit. To every person their due.
How to distinguish a Marxist from a non-Marxist? Everyone who believes that proletarian dictatorship is needed, after the overthrow of capitalism, to improve social conditions, is a Marxist. The idea of proletarian dictatorship unites all kinds of communists: Stalinists, Trotskyites, Leninists, etc. Anarchists are not Marxists because they are against any form of state (capitalist or proletarian). But all communists are Marxists and all Marxists are communists. These social engineers, like Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, form parties that are said to be "the vanguards of proletariat."
ReplyDeleteThe failure of Bolsheviks, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, is a very powerful argument against Marx's idea of proletarian dictatorship. But some disagree, saying that the theory is good but was not applied properly. This implies that communist ideology is not falsifiable. Facts consistent with it can be used to validate
Ludwik Kowalski, the author of “Diary of a Former Communist: Thoughts, Feelings, Reality,” at
h*ttp://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/life/intro.html (but no *)
It is an autobiography illustrating my evolution from one extreme to another--from a devoted Stalinist to an active anti-communist. This testimony is based on a diary I kept between 1946 and 2004 (in the USSR, Poland, France and the USA).