Talk:Communism

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Older comments

I don’t think you can actually decide that Frank Zappa and Will Rogers are “Anti-communists” because of a single quotation. Setting them both up in the same category as Ronald Regan and Rush Limbaugh is rather deceptive.

To be honest this article is problematic and should probably be reconsidered. If it must be put up it the headings should be put up as “Quotes in favor of Communism” versus “Quotes against Communism.”

One too many "m"s in "communism" in the "quotes against commmunism" section

Questionable quote

• "Have a red instead."
  –Murray Ross

According to the wikipedia article linked this person was a Canadian educator. The article didn't mention anything about him being involved in politics. Besides that, there is really no way of telling if the quote is for or against communism or has anything to do with it at all. For all we know it might be about wine. Steve Dufour 05:42, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Problems with recently added Solzhenitsyn quote

1. There is no source identified.
2. The quote is not "notable" as it should be. Quote 1 yields 45 Google results at this moment (07:19 GMT, 7 August 2008). Quote 2 yields 277. Quote 3 yields 153. "History has proven that no kind of people could be more dangerous or more pesterous than the communist." yields 1 (a single) result as a sentence.
Bortz

Which Adlai Stevenson?

So, which Adlai Stevenson was it who said ""Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity – in short, of tyranny – and it is committed to making tyranny universal."? The link is to a disambiguation page on wikipedia with links to Adlai Stevenson I, II, III, and IV. I'm assuming it was Adlai Stevenson II, the most well-known of the four (aka the Democratic presidential candidate who lost twice to Eisenhower... odd that he'd be better known that his dad, who was Vice President, but that's how it goes...) but some clarification would be nice. 76.102.162.163 07:47, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

Missing quote

It surprises me that this quote by Karl Marx never appears on this page: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win". It's considered one of the powerful pro communism quotes around and yet it's absence from the page almost hints the editors are biased.

—This unsigned comment is by 80.254.146.140 (talk • contribs) .

OF COURSE the editors are biased — ALL PEOPLE are biased in some way — the distinctions between improper or proper biases people make or obscure with words are more astute observations to be made, such as biases that exist between those inclined to diligence or laziness, complaint or contributions. There are plainly pro and anti communist biases at work on this page, and on the whole it remains largely neglected. I might try to do some cleanup here within a few weeks, with a bias towards a more well formatted and organized article, rather than the mess it is, if I find the time, but I make no promises. ~ Kalki (talk · contributions) 00:19, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

To people who care about it enough to complain: please note that anyone can edit. Do you care enough to look up the source and add the quote into the article? ~ Ningauble 18:10, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

Unsourced

• "It is remarkable that some of the most precious rights of human welfare are attributed to the advocacy and practice of communists; and yet, in the same breath, we are asked to hate communists."- Oliver Cox

• "Communism is not a set of measures to be put into practice after the seizure of power. It is a movement which already exists, not as a mode of production (there can be no communist island within capitalist society), but as a tendency which originates in real needs. Communism does not even know what value is. The point is not that one fine day a large number of people start to destroy value and profit. All past revolutionary movements were able to bring society to a standstill, and waited for something to come out of this universal stoppage. Communization, on the contrary, will circulate goods without money, open the gate isolating a factory from its neighbourhood, close down another factory where the work process is too alienating to be technically improved, do away with school as a specialized place which cuts off learning from doing for 15 odd years, pull down walls that force people to imprison themselves in 3-room family units - in short, it will tend to break all separations."
  –Gilles Dauvé

• "Communism is the end of the economy as a separate and privileged field on which everything else depends while despising and fearing it."
  –Gilles Dauvé

• "The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."
  "There is no other definition of communism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man."
  –Che Guevara

• "I worked at a factory owned by Germans, at coal pits owned by Frenchmen, and at a chemical plant owned by Belgians. There I discovered something about capitalists. They are all alike, whatever the nationality. All they wanted from me was the most work for the least money that kept me alive. So I became a communist."
  –Nikita Khrushchev

• "The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic."
  –Vladimir Lenin

• "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."
  –Karl Marx

• "Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves."
  –Karl Marx

• "The theory of the Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."
  "From each, according to his ability; to each, according to his needs."
  "Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations."
  "Democracy is the road to socialism."
  "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!"
  –Karl Marx

• "Communism is the graveyard of ambition"
  –Daniel R. Bou Diab

• "Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: 'No man should have so much.' The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: 'All men should have as much.' "
  –Phelps Adams

• "Communism and fascism or Nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority."
  –James A. C. Brown

• "Justice is always naive and self-confident; believing that it will immediately win once recognized. That is the reason why the forces of Justice are so poorly organized. On the other hand, the Evil is cynic, sly and fantastically organized. It never ever has the illusion of the ability to stand on its own feet and to win in a fair competition. That is why it is ready to use any kind of means without hesitation. And of course it does - under the banners of the most noble ideas."
  –Vladimir Bukovsky

• "From the days of Spartacus, Karl Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th Century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."
  "A communist is like a crocodile – when it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile or preparing to eat you up."
  "The substance of the eminent Socialist gentlemen's speech is that making a profit is a sin. It is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss!"
  –Winston Churchill

• "The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might, and the Republic is in danger. Yes - danger from within and without. We need law and order! Without it our nation cannot survive."
  –Adolf Hitler

• "Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both."
  –John Fitzgerald Kennedy

• "No one is so stubborn and dangerous as the beneficiaries of a fallen idea - they defend not the idea, but their bare life and the loot."
  –Sándor Márai

• "Don't listen to what the Communists say, but look at what they do."
  - Nguyen Van Thieu, the President of South Vietnam.

• "Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it, and hell where they already have it."
  "How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
  "The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."
  "In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis – a crisis where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union ... [Communism will be] left on the ash heap of history."
  –Ronald Reagan

• "Communism is like Prohibition, it's a good idea but it won't work"
  –Will Rogers

• "At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent."
  –Joseph Sobran

• "For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion."
  "I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either."
  "In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State."
  –Alexander Solzhenitsyn

• "Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice."
  "Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity – in short, of tyranny – and it is committed to making tyranny universal.
  –Adlai E. Stevenson

• "Communists always say that Capitalism leaves holes for crime, poverty and a higher society and that it is wrong. Communists do an even worse job at correcting this. Capitalism has a mission to give every person everything they want, and right now we are set out to fulfill that mission. All we lack is a means."
  –Cole Stewart

• "It all came from there."
  –Lech Walesa, pointing to a TV when a reporter asked him why communism fell

• "Communists are of two kinds only. Gadarene Swine whose wits have been taken from them so that they rush headlong down the slope to their own destruction, and ordinary voracious swine who, if you were standing in their sty, had a heart-attack and fell among them, would instantly set upon and devour you."
  -Dennis Wheatley

• "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."
  –Frank Zappa

• "The scientific approach uncovers, that Communism does not eliminate the inequality between men, the social injustice, exploitation of man by man and other evils of society – communism merely changes their form and gives birth to new evils, which become eternal fellow-travelers of communism."
  "All in all, Engels talked so much rot of every kind, that now all the world’s academies of science should be directed to rectify his mistakes and idiocies.""
  -Aleksandr Zinovyev

• "Today the primary threat to the liberties of the American people comes not from communism, foreign tyrants or dictators. It comes from the tendency on our own shores to centralize power, to trust bureaucracies rather than people."
  –George H. Allen

• Of the Communist Party: "Its relationship to democratic institutions is that of the death watch beetle - it is not a party, it is a conspiracy."
  ~ Aneurin Bevan, attributed

• "The devotion of such titans of spirit as Lenin to an Ideal must bear fruit. The nobility of his selflessness will be an example through centuries to come, and his Ideal will reach perfection."
  –Mahatma Gandhi

• "In October 1917, we parted with the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, a world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road."
  –Mikhail Gorbachev

• "Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate."
  "If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another name?"
  –Graham Greene

• "The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians"
  –Henry Louis Mencken

• "In Germany, [the Nazis] first came for the Communists, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me – and by that time no one was left to speak up."
  –Martin Niemoller

• "Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen."
  –Leon Trotsky

• "Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool."
  George Bernard Shaw

• "We first fought the heathens in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change."
  –Serj Tankian

• "We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. ... The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist."
  –E. B. White

• "Communism is the perfect system, in theory. As are Monarchy, Fascism and Democracy. The only reason they don't work, is because of Human nature to pervert the situation into the best one for them. Nothing else."
  –Samuel Webster

Biased quote selection

Why is it that a quote by John Adams gets to be the header and the caption under the soviet flag? Wouldn't something by Lenin or Marx be more fitting? 169.235.104.199 06:24, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Well, the Soviet Union was a communist state, at least nominally. So, a Soviet flag is fitting for a lead image. – Illegitimate Barrister, 23:51, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Communism is the most painful path between capitalism and capitalism.

There are pro communist/anti capitalism quotes+images on this page. Only fitting to have some anti communist-pro capitalist ones as well, such as Communism is the most painful path between capitalism and capitalism. by Scott Adams. --2001:8003:412B:6300:988A:1B7B:BB1C:989B 03:48, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Seidler's notability

I removed two quotes per WQ:Q, I searched about the author but I couldn't find any evidence of notability:

• The Communist party, in terms of both its aboveground and underground activities, was at its height of power. During that decade the disciples of Lenin and Stalin penetrated far and wide into American life. During most of the years following the Russian Revolution the Communists throughout the world were constantly making vigorous and vicious attacks not only upon conservative groups but upon liberal and socialist groups as well. All other groups with left and center orientations were looked upon as rivals that had to be destroyed. Indeed, the Communists behaved in accordance with a theory that suggested that Socialists were more of a threat to their ambitions than Fascists.
  • Murray B. Seidler, Norman Thomas: Respectable Rebel, Syracuse University Press (1961) pp. 120-21

• During the early months of the Nazi regime, the Communists sought rapprochement with the Fascists, but the former were soon to realize that they had misjudged the potential of a Fascist Germany.
  • Murray B. Seidler, Norman Thomas: Respectable Rebel, Syracuse University Press (1961) p. 121

Rupert Loup 06:44, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Images

Per WQ:MOBILEFRIENDLY.

[[File:AntonPannekoek1908.jpg|thumb|The workers are master of the means of production no more than under Western capitalism. They receive their wages and are exploited by the State as the only mammoth capitalist. ... The entirety of the ruling and leading bureaucracy of officials is the actual owner of the factories, the possessing class. ~ [[Antonie Pannekoek]]]]
[[File:Dunayevskaya-raya.jpg|thumb|"Bureaucratic state socialism" is an irrational expression behind which there exists the real economic relation of [[State capitalism|state-capitalist]]-[[Exploitation|exploiter]] to the propertyless exploited. ~ [[Raya Dunayevskaya]]]]
[[File:Thomas Merton hermitage interior (Abbey of Gethsemani).jpg|thumb|The chief weakness of Communism is that it is, itself, only another breed of the same materialism which is the source and root of all the evils which it so clearly sees, and it is evidently nothing but another product of the breakdown of the capitalist system. Indeed, it seems to be pieced together out of the ruins of the same ideology that once went into the vast, amorphous, intellectual structure underlying capitalism in the nineteenth century. ~ [[Thomas Merton]]]]
[[File:Statues of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - Near Alexanderplatz - Eastern Berlin - Germany.jpg|thumb|right|The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of [[private property]]. ~ [[Karl Marx]] and [[Friedrich Engels]]]]
[[File:Friedrich Engels portrait (cropped).jpg|thumb|Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. ~ [[Friedrich Engels]]]]
[[File:Communist Party 21092014 Ankara Solidarity march with Van ISKUR workers.jpg|thumb|The [[proletarian]]s have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to [[win]]. [[w:Workers of the world, unite!|WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!]] ~ [[Karl Marx]] and [[Friedrich Engels]]]]
[[File:Global Distribution of Wealth v3.svg|thumb|Communism was a very defective answer to some very good questions. In throwing out the bad answer, we have forgotten the good questions. I want to put the good questions back on the table. ~ [[Tony Judt]]]]
[[File:József_körút_a_Corvin_(Kisfaludy)_köznél._Harcképtelenné_tett_ISU-152-es_szovjet_rohamlövegek,_a_háttérben_egy_T-34-85_harckocsi._Fortepan_24854.jpg|thumb|[R]ationalism, contempt for tradition, and hatred for the mythological layer of culture to which the Enlightenment gave birth developed, under communism, into the brutal persecution of religion, but also into the principle (practiced rather than directly expressed) that human beings are expendable: that individual lives count only as instruments of the 'greater whole' or the 'higher cause,' i.e. the state. ~ [[w:Leszek Kołakowski|Leszek Kołakowski]]]]
[[File:Gustave de Molinari.jpg|thumb|Whether communism is partial or complete, [[political economy]] is no more tolerant of it than it is of [[monopoly]], of which it is merely an extension. ~ [[Gustave de Molinari]]]]
[[File:Martin Luther King, Jr..jpg|thumb|Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. ~ [[Martin Luther King, Jr.]]]]
[[File:Capture communist flags in Long Hai hills, 1968.jpg|thumb|Don't listen to what communists say, instead look closely at what the communists do!  ~ {{w|Nguyễn Văn Thiệu}}]]
[[File:Communist leaders emblem.jpg|thumb|{{w|Better red than dead}}. ~ [[Bertrand Russel]]]]
[[File:Nixon Moon.gif|thumb|Nonetheless, one final and inescapable conflict remains before us, the war between [[democracy]] and communism. Although each side has equipped itself with fearsome weapons and is pitted against the other in readiness for battle, the core of their conflict is internal and ideological. Which side will triumph in this final ideological conflict? Anyone who believes in the reality of God will surely answer that democracy will win. ~ [[Sun Myung Moon]]]]
[[File:Mao Zedong rice field.jpg|thumb|We communists are like seeds and the people are the soil. Wherever we go, we must unite with the people, take root and blossom among them. ~ [[Mao Zedong]]]]
[[File:Aime Cesaire 2003.jpg|thumb|The dead, the tortured, the executed ... these are not the kind of ghosts that one can ward off with a mechanical phrase. From now on, they will show up as watermarks in the very substance of the system. ~ [[Aimé Césaire]]]]

Rupert Loup 18:28, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Point of View of the Introductory Paragraph

The statement that people in a communist society lose their individual rights and that the government holds absolute power was removed from the page on the grounds that it was from a particular point of view. However, it seems to me that this sentence was objective, since every time a society has actually become communist, the result has been a loss of rights and increased control by an authoritarian government. As it was, the paragraph only included the ideology of communism and not the practical results of it.

--Mathematician2718 (talk) 23:35, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

"Society has actually become communist" There have never been communist societies in human history, only socialist regimes ruled by communist parties, so your assertion makes little sense.--Mhorg (talk) 09:50, 22 November 2021 (UTC)