The ABC of communism revisited (original) (raw)
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The Characteristic of Family and (Re-)Education in the Communist Perspective
deceptive because it represents the bad deeds it commits as good. 4 The communist legal system is dangerous because it creates laws which on the face of it try to meet the human desire for justice but in fact bring about political tyranny. 5 Communism wants to create a new human, new attitude to work, new discipline, new morality. This new morality is necessary for building communism. What does it consist in? First of all it has a practical function-it is an instrument of the state. The new form of morality no longer rests on religious or traditional values. The new morality is determined by economic and social conditions and relations in society. According to Marx's theory morally bad and improper habits cannot be changed by preaching or moralizing, but only by changing the material conditions of society. 6 Morality is not valuable in itself, it is rather a means for attaining the goal, which is building the new world, reaching ideal communism, creating classless society. We can see that this conception of morality is really quite new and has nothing to do with the morality of the Western civilization so far, which is based on Christian values. 7 Communism totally changed the perception of good and evil. The criterion for judging good behaviour is no longer the individual's conscience. Within this new morality conscience is not something to be respected, it is merely to be formed. The one who forms the citizens' conscience is the communist party. It only is the donor and protector of new morality. 8 Morality has the task of strengthening the influence of the party in areas of private life, such as marriage, family and rearing children, i.e., areas that cannot be much regulated by laws. Morality becomes a form of social control and should replace the law. 9 It is desirable to reach the ideal state when it will no longer be necessary to use power to enforce proper behaviour because citizens will be so disciplined that there will be but minimum control over them. 10 But if morality is merely a means of social control, it is useless to think about the justification of moral judgments, about ethical reasoning, or analyse concepts such as guilt and the good. Morally good is what the party approves. But when the party becomes the conscience of people, the individual cannot be viewed as one who acts morally because she is not the master of her decisions. It is quite evident that this new morality, a communist invention, totally contradicts the natural law. It is significant that the very first to point out the danger and perversity of communist ideology was not a politician or an economist but Pope Leo XIII. Even before the Bolshevik revolution, which attempted to apply Marxist theory in practice, he predicted what would follow. 11 John Paul II writes about his predecessor's prediction: "Pope Leo XIII in a certain sense predicted the rise of communism for which humanity and Europe would pay dearly because the cure, as he wrote in 1891 in his encyclical, could be more dangerous than the disease! The Pope proclaimed this with the dignity and authority of the teaching Church." 12 Communist ideology as the greatest heresy became the following popes' target of criticism. 13 The French historian of ideas Alain
Executive Editor of the Annals of Communism Series
a n n a l s o f c o m m u n i s m Each volume in the series Annals of Communism will publish selected and previously inaccessible documents from former Soviet state and party archives in a narrative that develops a particular topic in the history of Soviet and international communism. Separate English and Russian editions will be prepared. Russian and American scholars work together to prepare the documents for each volume. Documents are chosen not for their support of any single interpretation but for their particular historical importance or their general value in deepening understanding and facilitating discussion. The volumes are designed to be useful to students, scholars, and interested general readers.
2018
A brief commentary on communism extracted from my work on conventional ideologies at the Universiti Putra Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur.
2002
A responses to this article has been written by Natasha Artemeva and has been published in the next edition of AE-Extra The nature of the Soviet educational system has been developing in accordance with the Soviet Union's 70-year history. During these years that the Soviet Union was controlled by the communist party, it developed an ideology centered on communist party doctrine. Also, under the leadership of different rulers the system of Soviet Education passed through many changes and reforms. Consequently, it is difficult to describe the entire history of soviet education in brief since it is such a broad topic and comprehensive from its political and ideological perspective.
a reassessment of the party's educational programme was proposed and a school municipal programme was developed. The Bolsheviks addressed seriously the role of propaganda among teachers and supported the organization of the Social Democratic Teachers' Group in Petrograd. Moreover, efforts to implement specific aspects of the Bolshevik programme were undertaken in the Vyborgskii district of Petrograd, where the Bolsheviks controlled the local Duma. The successes and failures of these early attempts to devise a communist educational strategy are scrutinized and assessed here. The study is based on an analysis of the contemporary press, archival materials and published documents.
The International Bibliography of Journal Articles on Communist Studies. Issue 2010
2010
The International Bibliography of Journal Articles on Communist Studies. Issue 2009. Internationale Artikelbibliographie der historischen Kommunismusforschung. Bibliographie internationale d'articles concernant la recherches sur le communisme. Compiled by Gleb J. Albert and Bernhard H. Bayerlein (With contributions from Kostis Karpozilos and others) This bibliography is an attempt to bundle articles on the history of Communism and related topics published during the year 2009 in scientific journals and serials worldwide. The items are sorted by journal titles and issues. In case a journal published less than two articles on the relevant topics during 2009, these articles are listed under "Other journals". We have tried to make the citations as complete as possible, yet in some cases it was not possible to retrieve the page numbers. 708 journal contributions on the history of Communism and related topics have been investigated and retrieved for the year 2009, yet we are...
Fulfilling the Bolshevik Ideal
If you want to break with the past, then you should do it completely. 1 FOREWARD This is a study of Russian Constructivism, a movement born in revolution and inspiring some of the most audacious experiments in social engineering during the first decades of Soviet power. As a cultural force equal to the revolutionary politics of Bolshevik leaders, Constructivism was not asserted as an aesthetic style but as an ideology, capable of transforming both the physical world and the everyday lives of Soviet citizens. Because the new society could not be based on traditional aesthetic values or the tastes of bourgeois consumers, a new art had to convey the communist ethos. Celebrating and propagandizing freedom through socialism, artists designed models for the future construction of Soviet culture, dedicating monuments, slogans and song to the new regime. As utopian "experiments for the future," their works epitomize the hopes, triumphs, and ultimate failure of early socialist ideals. 2 As Christopher Read argues, the "cultural revolution was at the heart of the Bolshevik project." 3 As the Bolsheviks struggled to legitimize their authority through cultural transformation, the Constructivists worked under the most promising conditions of creative freedom and government sponsorship. After years of revolution, famine, and civil war, however, many of their projects remained only conceptualized due to material 1