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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27362 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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A lot of self-identified Marxists really do not seem to grasp the concept of the veil of ignorance.)

You don't understand Marxism. This here was written by a guy who was a respected and prominent Trotskyist in 1930s.

NON-COMMUNISTS HAVE OFTEN upbraided communists for what are alleged to be gross inconsistencies in communist behavior. The charge goes as follows: You communists call for a maximum of free speech, free press, free assembly and other civil rights in the United States and other non-communist countries; but inside the countries where communists are in power you have suppressed, or virtually suppressed, all these rights. You uphold the right to strike in non-communist countries, and very often exercise that right in practice when you are in control of trade unions; but in the communist countries it is criminal, in some cases a capital crime, to strike or merely advocate striking.

If you were able to understand the historical dialectic—which, since you are not a communist, you cannot really do: only the living practice of communism makes possible a genuine understanding of the theory of communism—you would realize that there are no inconsistencies. In every case the seeming contradictories, in the reality of time and history, reinforce each other and fuse their dynamism into a synthesis at a higher historical level. The communist camp is the thesis which represents the historical interests of the revolution, therefore of peace, freedom, justice, well-being, and the future of mankind in the coming epoch of a truly human history. Anything that strengthens the communist camp is right and just and good. In the present transitional era of world struggle, of wars and revolutions, the use of civil rights inside the communist camp to publicize opposition to the line of the Party and the revolution would only express the intrusion of counterrevolutionary influences, of capitalist hangovers and imperialist interventions; the proper purpose of public speech and assembly is to support, strengthen and improve the work of the revolution, not to sabotage it.

Is there a source for this quote somewhere I can find?

It's copied straight out of a pirated copy of 'Suicide of the West' by James Burnham I got from Anna's Archive.

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