Prudentialist Interview
Added 2022-03-06 07:57:20 +0000 UTCLinks at https://findmyfrens.net/theprudentialist/
Comments
In countries where there were strong Communist parties (e.g. postwar France, early 20th century Spain, for both periods Greece) they were sociologically very hard to tell apart from religious groups (esp. RW Catholics): they'd have their own institutions (social clubs/local communities, newspapers, trade unions, militias, etc), systems of patronage, & rituals to link them to a larger movement urbi et orbi-style. After the Revolution (in Russia), Communists were still Communists, even the apparatchiks. If you look into Soviet archives (Kotkin, a Soviet Historian, makes this point very often), you’ll see that in meetings everybody exchanges party slogans & theory, and ideological rigour wins over ruling-class interests or just reason quite often, there’s no point where they drop the mask and act like those Animal Farm pigs. So I’d say the main difference is not whether there’s a telos that's great enough to inspire active, genuine belief, but what that telos is: Communism promises real stuff, and is no less optimistic & generous than religions are in their otherworldly claims (it must: who's dying for a 1% better society? It has to be for paradise, somewhere), Communist beliefs are both fantastical and material. And this becomes an issue as soon as time passes and your godless enemies seem closer to your god than you are, for Christians this is the long defeat, but the whole point of Communism is that waiting was never an option.
Joan C.
2022-03-07 19:24:46 +0000 UTCBog is 100% right about communism being a genuine belief in the years after ww2. People defected and spied often out of a strong conviction that Moscow was the future, in western democracies millions of people voted communist in the years 45-55, they were not bribed or cynical. French communist party got around a quarter of the vote every legislative election from 45 to 56.
Josef Jensen
2022-03-07 14:24:48 +0000 UTC
