With this post I want to delve a little deeper into Marxism, Socialism, and Communism - a topic I have touched on a few times in the past (in comments), and a topic where I see broad misunderstanding related to what each system of governance actually is, how each was implemented, and the overall implications to the world. 

First let me explain what I believe Marxism to be - and also attempt to describe how the actions taken by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot in their respective countries was vastly different from Marxism as envisioned by Carl Marx. Marxism as laid out by Carl Marx involved a government controlled by the working class that would eventually dissolve in order to achieve a stateless society. The means of production would then be controlled by a proletarian state that will in theory lead to an egalitarian stateless society that governs itself without coercive institutions.  

There is a very important distinction when describing what happened in the Soviet Union, or what its close communist counterparts achieved and or were working towards. Bolshevism, Maoism, and the like, are inherently right wing totalitarian perversions of Marxism. Bolshevism in the Soviet Union was a right wing perversion of Marxism, It was a departure from Marxism, and moved to the right in the most extreme way – as such, an objective fact in political theory.   

Right wing doctrine is the advocacy of or adherence to hierarchy, that’s technically speaking, what right wing means. Leftism is the advocacy of or adherence to egalitarianism, and as such it implies societal power structures that are much more horizontal. The more left wing an ideology is, the more it opposes hierarchy and authority. That’s why completely anti authoritarian ideologies like anarchism, and anarcho-syndicalism, are considered to be the furthest extreme of leftism. Once you begin to introduce something like a state into that ideology, like what happened with Bolshevism, that ideology will immediately move to the right. 

So within the realm of socialism, there is a broad spectrum of left and right. On the far left side, you have completely egalitarian societies, where there is no hierarchy of authority, such as in anarchism and the extreme end of Marxism. On the right side of the spectrum is socialism, where you have extreme hierarchy such as in totalitarian socialist societies like the USSR –and that is far from Marxism as it was envisioned. 

The USSR was an extreme right wing deviation from Marxism and that fact is widely agreed on by political scientists and historians. We can all agree that the Soviet Union did not respect the principal idea in Marxism that all citizens were equal and deserving of equal rights and opportunities. The Soviet Union did not support the working class, and the Soviet Union whole heartedly embraced hierarchy as well as nationalistic foreign and defense policies. 

The following is the definition of right wing. “right wing ideologies tend to emphasize the values of order, patriotism, social cohesion, and a personal sense of duty that makes the individual citizen who knows his place responsive to discipline from his political and social superiors.” - a nearly perfect description of the USSR.  

This is also essentially what’s going on in Venezuela as well. We can understand what happened with Stalin and make the correlation to what is presently happening with Maduro in Venezuela. There is a situation where the government essentially promotes left wing beliefs in how the society should be organized, but still oversees and participates in a system of governance that is essentially right wing and totalitarian in its application…  

I hope everyone reading has a broader understanding of the topic, and I welcome any and all comments...

Thanks for reading...

MDG...