Feel free to amalgamate the next few points I make
As for the 'Left Opposition' of the late 1920s, their policy platform was potentially disastrous for the long-term survival of the Soviet Union, and when they failed to gain sufficient support for their group through constitutional channels, they tried to foment a popular uprising against the Soviet government in 1927. The Soviet government, not being suicidal, crushed them
That is very true, but were they not committed ideologues just as dedicated to the communist cause?
That's strange; I always thought they were tree-hugging middle class liberals.
That is the perception of the green movement and half the time that is true. It is like healthy food, an eccentric obsession for some middle class people, that is in Britain, and only in Britain. In western Germany and other countries like it constitutional laws (among other things like cold war sentiment, ect) basically forbid the communists from having political form, so they organise through the auspices of the green movement. even so, suppose they are not Marxist Leninists (which was not what I was suggesting) but utopian socialists, doesn't that basically make them communists?
There is no such thing as 'conceptual/artistic communism'. Neither Marx, Engels, nor Lenin had left any clear guidelines as to what would or would not constitute 'communist art'. This, in fact, was part of the problem faced by the Soviet authorities when they tried to create a coherent, unified artistic style for Soviet art. The solution which was finally reached by 1934 was to create an eclectic form of neo-classicism called 'socialist realism'.
It is hard to entirely quantify but I think they had a view of 'man'. It is in dialectical materialism; it implies that there was a time before property ownership and therefore at such a time the social conditions of man were not dictated by his economic situation, and so, presumably he lived in a state of primitive idealistic social communism, like the Christian 'garden of Eden' thing. Isn't the central basis of the Jewish question that political emancipation can only occur after economic emancipation, this word 'Emancipation' implies that man has a true nature of 'goodness' or whatever. Then you also have the end point of dialectical materialism where man changes his economic status, thereby changing what he is socially, SO communism is a process to the ultimate perfection of a new
communist man. Yes it has a 'scientific basis' but in its existentialism Marxist communism is basically indistinguishable from utopian socialism which is its real basis of attraction.
Stalinist 'cultural populism' (by which I presume you mean socialist realism) was actually not intended to be populist. It was intended to elevate the Soviet masses while still being comprehensible to them. The masses were given the art which the authorities felt they should have, not what they actually wanted (which was mostly trashy novels, risque movies and jazz music). The Soviet artistic and cultural institutions had the same sort of attitude towards the popular consumption of art and culture which the BBC has.
What I was referring to was not specifically 'socialist realism', though that was part of it, I was referring to the whole culture. It was a concessionist attempt to give people what they wanted, which was not progress. You had the re-emergence of national history with a sense of historic ties to the past which were not generally acceptable until the great patriotic war in addition to a scaling back of the assault on orthodox Christianity. In architecture you have neo gothic, traditionalist, very European, even baroque styles of architecture, a radical diversion from continental modernism and the radical audacity of sleek blockish constructivism.
Obviously they call that all communism, like how the communist party now thinks Christianity is compatible with socialism and want Stalin canonised as a saint, really it is a sign of weakness, therefore, it is not communistic it is reactionary. What do you think the thoughts of most contemporary socialists are on traditional culture here in Britain? At the very best they are willing to accept pseudo historical Billy Bragg garbage, but that is as far as it goes.
You're trying to discredit Communism by citing the example of a Red Alert commie cosplay fag who has dyed his hair pink?
It’s a zee actually, 'it' is going through a sex change operation. fandom aside it is a communist. I am not saying it discredits the ideology, But I think he is symptomatic of cognitive dissonance.
Futurism may be associated with fascism in Italy, but in Russia it is associated with Communism. The most prominent of the Futurist poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky, was posthumously canonised in the 1930s as the Poet Laureate of the Soviet Union. And neither the Italian Futurists nor the Russian Futurists would have pissed on that pink-haired cosplay fag if he was on fire.
not to change the subject (returning to the original point), isn't Russian national identity itself partly defined through communism as well? The issue is was futurism ever sincerely communist or was it doing what all artists did and maintaining their commissions by making peace with the regime.
Indeed. I was myself contrasting the Italian Futurists with the Russian Futurists, in order to suggest that there is nothing inherently fascistic in Futurism. The Futurist aesthetic could equally well be used to support Communism, as in fact it did in Russia...
The Italian fascists, it seems to me, regarded the Italian Futurists as what Lenin famously called "useful idiots" - they made use of their support during their rise to power, but sidelined them as soon as they were no longer useful. The same can be said of the Bolsheviks' attitude towards the Russian Futurists, of course.
The fascists didn't need useful idiots, they provided that all by themselves, and there were certainly allot of conned losers - the futurists were not among them, they got mostly everything they wanted. What I meant was that at the founding of the fascist movement they were there at the beginning forming the bulk of the early leadership as well as membership, and their written material the face of the party, so they had an active part in the shaping and defining of the fascist movement, a position not shared by their socialist counterparts.