The Communist Question History and future of an idea
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2. Liberal Socialism or Communism?¶
Highlight (yellow) - Bobbio contra Hobhouse: liberal socialism as an escape from conflict > Location 1608¶
in order to define a country as democratic, it is necessary to take into account not only the institutions in force within it, but also the relations it has with other countries:
Highlight (yellow) - Bobbio contra Hobhouse: liberal socialism as an escape from conflict > Location 1615¶
the ideal of freedom cannot be separated from the principle of "international equality" and the critique of the "imperial" or imperialist idea
3. Maturation of the communist project and liberal legacy¶
Highlight (orange) - Liberal Legacy and Criticism of Populism > Location 2076¶
the development of the communist movement is the story of a recurrent but never really decisive confrontation with populism. It
Highlight (yellow) - Communism as a chapter in the history of religions? > Location 2292¶
If, for Engels, the aspiration to the Kingdom of God did nothing more than express in theological guise the vaguely communist demands of certain social strata, for the interpreters of whom we are speaking, the socialist and communist slogans do nothing more than express, in a superficially secularized form, the traditional religious aspiration to the Kingdom of God.
Highlight (yellow) - Communism as a chapter in the history of religions? > Location 2321¶
for this reason, after having overthrown the old regime, in order to be able to build a new and relatively stable order, every great revolutionary movement must go through a laborious and contradictory learning process.
Highlight (yellow) - Communism as a chapter in the history of religions? > Location 2325¶
to know how to govern meant to be able to give concrete content to ideals which, however great and noble they might be, They had not yet come to terms with reality.
Highlight (pink) - Communism as a chapter in the history of religions? > Location 2326¶
the process of learning and learning to govern are the passage from the indeterminate negation, which imagines the new order to be built as the totally Other - a representation proper to the religions of salvation - to the "determined negation" that relocates the revolutionary transformation on the terrain of history and concrete political action.
Highlight (yellow) - The messianism of the totally Other > Location 2364¶
There are situations in which the state can act as a brake, even if partial, to the unlimited violence unleashed by civil society: to give just one example, in the USA of white supremacy it was civil society hegemonized by white racists that unleashed the hunt for the black, not infrequently taken from prison by an angry mob and thus removed from state justice and subjected to torture and lynching staged as popular and extra-legal justice.
Highlight (yellow) - The messianism of the totally Other > Location 2379¶
More exactly, their internationalism is expressed in the promotion of struggles for national liberation.
Highlight (yellow) - Return to "utopian socialism"? A quixotic enterprise > Location 2633¶
we have not yet asked ourselves the essential question: is there really a socialism or communism that is not "state-based"?
4. Communism as Escapism and as a "Real Movement"¶
Highlight (yellow) - How Messianism Turns into Capitulationism > Location 2999¶
the Cultural Revolution had taken up a basic motif, the mockery of "formal" freedoms and the rule of law. Breaking with this view, Deng Xiaoping emphasized in 1979 that the extension and improvement of the "legal system" was the precondition for the real development of "democracy"
Highlight (pink) - How Messianism Turns into Capitulationism > Location 3024¶
we have seen that when the slavery of a people is at stake (or, we may add, its colonial subjugation or even its nuclear annihilation), if it serves to avert such dangers, "despotic government" may be the best option;
Highlight (orange) - How Messianism Turns into Capitulationism > Location 3028¶
if it did not emerge with particular clarity the dialectic according to which the messianism that emerges on the occasion of great historical crises, exhausting itself in periods of normality, tends to turn into capitulation to the dominant ideology.
Highlight (yellow) - Unpredictability of the historical process and... > Location 3075¶
There is something more specific, consisting of the moves that can be used by the antagonists of the emancipation project pursued by a revolutionary movement: as early as 1868, in France, Ernest Renan indicated that colonial expansionism was "the only way out" to escape socialism. About three decades later, in Britain, Cecil Rhodes reiterated: "If you don't want civil war, you have to become imperialist"
Highlight (yellow) - Unpredictability of the historical process and... > Location 3099¶
The defeat of the Axis, despite the formation of a "socialist camp" in Eastern Europe in the wake of the advance of the Red Army, gave impetus not to a series of socialist revolutions but to a gigantic wave of anti-colonial revolutions, often directed or influenced by the Communists
Highlight (yellow) - Unpredictability of the historical process and... > Location 3112¶
The Cold War, which was becoming hot and even fiery in Indochina and in Cuba was in danger of turning into a nuclear holocaust, was largely the West's attempt to stifle the world's anti-colonialist revolution.
Highlight (orange) - Unpredictability of the historical process and... > Location 3122¶
victorious revolutions from below ended up being the exception rather than the rule.
Highlight (yellow) - Unpredictability of the historical process and... > Location 3130¶
Sometimes the danger of a transition from a passive to an active revolution was averted by a preventive counter-revolution, which, in the case of Indonesia, involved the preventive massacre of hundreds of thousands of Communists.
Highlight (yellow) - Unpredictability of the historical process and... > Location 3146¶
the anti-colonial revolution continued, but in different forms: it had passed from the political-military phase to the political-economic one.
Highlight (pink) - Unpredictability of the historical process and... > Location 3150¶
The attempt to reaffirm the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America has failed spectacularly; the hope that had been nurtured for some time in Washington that the triumph achieved in the Cold War could mean substantial control of Russia's immense energy assets and the reduction of this country to a semi-colonial condition has not been < è > realized; the wave of destabilization and regime changes disguised as "color revolutions" seems to have run out; the claim of the West and its leading country to sovereignly unleash wars in every corner of the world, even without the authorization of the UN Security Council, it is the subject of increasingly widespread contestation;
Highlight (yellow) - Unpredictability of the historical process and... > Location 3156¶
it is precisely the successes achieved by the second stage of the world anti-colonialist revolution that could end up shortening the period of relative stability and relative peace, correctly foreseen and wisely used by Deng Xiaoping.
Highlight (yellow) - ... A Double Definition of 'Communism' > Location 3184¶
compared to the bright future thus evoked, how limited and petty the struggles underway today appear! In this perspective, communism is an instrument of escape from reality, like any other religion.
Highlight (yellow) - ... A Double Definition of 'Communism' > Location 3193¶
a matter of building a post-capitalist and post-imperialist society, a society, however, that cannot and must no longer be imagined with the colors of a utopia that, with its ethereal beauty, diverts attention from the "real struggles" and the "real movement"