Communism (enforced socialism) is indelibly associated with brutality and despots, and has been assigned to the scrap heap of history.

An interesting article.

While most of rural India involves traditional oppression of lower castes its unusual in a democracy to have a full fledged communist insurgency.

Leafing through the Mangalorean for light reading I discovered this http://mangalorean.com/news.php?newstype=local&newsid=231113:

"Dantewada (Chhattisgarh), April 5 (IANS) It has been a year since Maoist guerrillas killed 76 troopers in a single ambush, their deadliest strike anywhere in the country. But the forests of Dantewada are still burning, the passage of 12 months exacerbating the seething resentment of the tribals, caught between the security forces and the Maoists."

Killing of 76 troops is certainly more than political activism.

Pete

The communists may have a fresh start in Australia, now that we have a communist PM, who has formed government with the Watermelons.

I lived through a period of history when entire universities of educated and supposedly "intelligent" young academics passionately extolled the virtues of the Socialist state, and totally ignored the fact that most of these states were screaming nightmares right out of Orwell's "1984."

It took an awful long time for most of them to grow up, although there does appear to be a lot of dinosaurs still residing in acedemia and within the halls of power in Australia's ABC.

Of course, most of thme now habve a new "ism", it is called "multiculturalism", and they are pursuing the destruction of their own culture and society with the same undiminished zeal that they pursued Socialism.

The only problem is, at least with Socialism you could eventually realise that you were wrong and take steps to remedy the situation. But with multiculturalism, the negative consequences of entrenched social division, race riots, terrorism, ghettoisation, spiraling crime rates, and eventual demands for "Self deturmination" from unassimilatable ethnic groups will be permanent.

It's not right to put all variants on socialism in the same basket.

The Marxist tradition itself - let alone the broader socialist tradition - is so diverse and broad that it is very difficult to pin down. There's the revisionist currents - influenced by liberalism - which fed into the Eurocommunist movement in the 70s and 80s. And there are the libertarian currents (think Rosa Luxemburg) which pose a distinct alternative to Leninism. Then there the fact that several generations of Critical Theory (eg: Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas, Benjamin) were influenced by Marxism - but which provided fresh perspectives in response to changing times.

I worry that these incredibly diverse currents will be lost with a simplistic rejection of socialism and Marxism that does not appreciate the diversity.

Then there are various democratic socialist currents: Jean Jaures in France who died trying to stop World War I; or Swedish Social Democracy - in the context of a liberal democracy, but promoting an expansive welfare state rather than a Soviet-style model.

And even though Cuba and Vietnam have severely authoritarian undercurrents: are these worse than elsewhere? Including governments supported by Western powers? Take Bahrain and Yemen - recently in the news - for a start.

We should be open-minded enough to see both the strengths and the weaknesses here; a nuanced approach that perceives what can be salvaged. (eg: Cuban health care; Swedish welfare state; work/life balance as in France)

But there's an issue with those streams of Marxism who see a protracted phase of economic neo-liberalism - without sufficient social protections - as 'necessary' to drive development and 'mobilise' the class force for change at a later date. If we can ameliorate suffering now we should do so. And the failure for communism to emerge well over 100 years since Marx wrote - show that 'economic fatalism' achieves little in the long run.

"And even though Cuba and Vietnam have severely authoritarian undercurrents" - Tristan are you kidding? that is the understatement of the year. Comparing this to Yemen does not reflect any better.

The Cuban health system is a shambles, and the showcase hospitals are generally only for the political elite, the rest barely get anything.

As for Sweden, having spent a fair time in Scandinavia, experiencing the huge cost of living, and the dreadful bureaucratic system, I would not wish to inflict that form of government on anyone.