[maxstep]

Where do communists fall when it comes to broad social issues like gay marriage, drug legalization, abortion, civil rights for minorities etc? I assumed most communists were against social reform judging by the policies countries like North Korea, China, USSR, and Cuba enacted, but many communists on this forum seem open to social reform so I became curious to your actual stance on the matter.

[Wolfman]

gay marriage, drug legalization, abortion, civil rights for minorities etc?

Against all marriage but for gay rights otherwise, in favor, never seen it talked about, in favor. All of this assumes a Socialist/Communist wonderland, as any progress under Capitalism just means that Capitalism is less likely to turn into glorious communism.

North Korea, China, USSR, and Cuba enacted

Degenerate Capitalism, Degenerate Capitalism, Degenerate Capitalism after Lenin, Degenerate Capitalism.

[KurtFF8]

Degenerate Capitalism, Degenerate Capitalism, Degenerate Capitalism after Lenin, Degenerate Capitalism.

Well one specific segment of the Marxist movement follows this line. Most, however, reject it.

[The Immortal Goon]

This is one of those issues that has divided socialists from the beginning.

The Connolly-DeLeon controversy is amongst the first.

Lenin, in taking control of the first worker's state, acknowledged that his views were that of an, "old man,"

The coercion of bourgeois marriage and bourgeois legislation on the family enhance the evil and aggravate the conflicts. It is the coercion of ‘sacrosanct’ property. It sanctifies venality, baseness, and dirt. The conventional hypocrisy of ‘respectable’ bourgeois society takes care of the rest. People revolt against the prevailing abominations and perversions. And at a time when mighty nations are being destroyed, when the former power relations are being disrupted, when a whole social world is beginning to decline, the sensations of the individual undergo a rapid change. A stimulating thirst for different forms of enjoyment easily acquires an irresistible force. Sexual and marriage reforms in the bourgeois sense will not do. In the sphere of sexual relations and marriage, a revolution is approaching in keeping with the proletarian revolution. Of course, women and young people are taking a deep interest in the complex tangle of problems which have arisen as a result of this. Both the former and the latter suffer greatly from the present messy state of sex relations. Young people rebel against them with the vehemence of their years. This is only natural. Nothing could be falser than to preach monastic self-denial and the sanctity of the filthy bourgeois morals to young people. However, it is hardly a good thing that sex, already strongly felt in the physical sense, should at such a time assume so much prominence in the psychology of young people. The consequences are nothing short of fatal. Ask Comrade Lilina about it. She ought to have had many experiences in her extensive work at educational institutions of various kinds and you know that she is a Communist through and through, and has no prejudices.

Youth’s altered attitude to questions of sex is of course ‘fundamental’, and based on theory. Many people call it ‘revolutionary’ and ‘communist’. They sincerely believe that this is so. I am an old man, and I do not like it. I may be a morose ascetic, but quite often this so-called ‘new sex life’ of young people and frequently of the adults too seems to me purely bourgeois and simply an extension of the good old bourgeois brothel. All this has nothing in common with free love as we Communists understand it. No doubt you have heard about the famous theory that in communist society satisfying sexual desire and the craving for love is as simple and trivial as ‘drinking a glass of water’. A section of our youth has gone mad, absolutely mad, over this ‘glass-of-water theory’. It has been fatal to many a young boy and girl. Its devotees assert that it is a Marxist theory. I want no part of the kind of Marxism which infers all phenomena and all changes in the ideological superstructure of society directly and blandly from its economic basis, for things are not as simple as all that. A certain Frederick Engels has established this a long time ago with regard to historical materialism.

Which is part of the reason, though Lenin was against it himself, he allowed a woman's section of the Bolsheviks to bring in prostitutes and other sex workers to be educated and then to aid the masses. Abortions were made cheap, legal, and safe. Divorces were made free, and available to both men and women to initiate. He presided over the first modern country to make homosexuality legal, to allow "so-called “wild marriage”; pair marriage, marriage in threes and even the complicated marriage of four people."

Lenin, as everyone agreed, having had better things to worry about, let things go.

It was Stalin that started putting a clamp on everything with the, "Decree on the Prohibition of Abortions, the Improvement of Material Aid to Women in Childbirth, the Establishment of State Assistance to Parents of Large Families, and the Extension of the Network of Lying-in Homes, Nursery schools and Kindergartens, the Tightening-up of Criminal Punishment for the Non-payment of Alimony, and on Certain Modifications in Divorce Legislation"

Trotsky took a more nuanced view, in that socialist society had to come from proletarian society, which had to have been developed from bourgeois society in the same way socialism develops from capitalism.

I think it's an important question.

I agree with Connolly, Lenin, and Trotsky.

I think that these things are not issues that the part can wave a magic wand around and resolve. To some extent, you're going to have to change the base and watch the superstructure change. Changing the superstructure and dictating what it's supposed to be like before the world's base is changed seems like complete ass-hattery to me. It's making cosmetic changes to your hair and hoping it cures heart disease by doing so.

---

So to close up, amongst Marxists it's a big issue. It tends to come down to whether you think there can be socialism in one country (though there are other factors). The idea being that if you can just conjure socialism into being, then you have to pull society up with you. This isn't is as radical as one may think—Jefferson said similar things, amongst other founding fathers. The Puritains certainly thought it was the case, as did others.

The people who reject socialism in one country (and thus tend to gravitate to permanent revolution, but not always) tend to think that society needs to be let to evolve by itself.

If you want to read about a microcosm of this, the proletkult wanted to eradicate the old society and build a new one by what it thought socialist society would be like, while the Narkompros tended to take a view that new education and art had to grow out of the old classics.

[Wolfman]

Well one specific segment of the Marxist movement follows this line. Most, however, reject it.

Whenever I've asked a Communist why the USSR collapsed, the answer is pretty much always "it wasn't socialist enough", and since Communists love to reduce everything to "Communism or Capitalism" it was therefor some form of Capitalism.

[Andropov]

I am from Eastern Europe (Ukraine) and hold radically culturally reactionary views (anti-multiculturalism, anti-gay marriage, anti-liberal in general), compared to most of my acquaintances in the United States, where I live today. Yet I consider myself a Communist, a Bolshevik, and a Soviet-Patriot. The same liberalism which destroyed the Soviet Union, the historical manifestation of Eastern European (East Slavic) civilization, is currently in the process of destroying Western Civilization. I consider cultural liberalism, whether in the USSR or in the USA, whether of Alexander Yakovlev or of Sustan Sontag, to be a Hegelian antithesis of the status-quo, a socio-cultural pathology that threatens to subvert and destroy the host culture's ideals and values.

[Decky]

Where do communists fall when it comes to broad social issues like gay marriage, drug legalization, abortion, civil rights for minorities etc?

I am against gay marriage (but then again I am against straight marriage too). State recognised marriage is dumb.

Legalisation for soft drugs but fuck heroin and meth, they are the scourge of the working class and people who sell then need to be put up against a wall and introduced to a firing squad.

Abortions far all who want then free of charge to the individual (you could pay for them nationalising religions).

Civil rights for minorities? You will need to be more specific, capitalists are a minority I don't believe they need any rights. Stamp collectors are also a minority, I have no problem with them.

What exactly do you mean?

[KlassWar]

Where do communists fall when it comes to broad social issues like gay marriage, drug legalization, abortion, civil rights for minorities etc? I assumed most communists were against social reform judging by the policies countries like North Korea, China, USSR, and Cuba enacted, but many communists on this forum seem open to social reform so I became curious to your actual stance on the matter.

1) Gay Marriage: Gays have to enjoy equal rights (no question about that), but I'm against marriage and the family altogether. Solvent, generous public services and public welfare will make things like child support, alimony or duty-to-care obsolete. Socialism and communism will destroy the material basis for family values bullshit.
2) Drug Legalization: Immediate and total legalization of all soft drugs (marijuana, ecstacy, etc). Divide hard drugs in groups (opiates, amphetamines, cocaine derivatives, barbiturates, etc) and legalize the least harmful drugs in each category. That'd encourage tweakers to drop the meth for regular amphetamine, crackheads to use regular coke instead, etc.
3) Abortion: Safe, legal and free on demand.
4) Civil Rights for Minorities: Civil rights for the working masses* (irrespective of nationality, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, etc). Fuck everyone else, no rights for them.

[SolarCross]

I probably not a proper communist as I am really more of an anarcho-communist and I am not at all well schooled in Marx or other communist thinkers.

As an anarcho-communist I don't think it is the business of any central authority to say what people must do in their own life or community.

That said my personal view is as socially conservative as they come. To me necrophilia, pedophilia, sodomy, bestiality, homosexuality, promiscuity, prostitution, excessive drug abuse, gambling are all biologically incorrect, unhealthy, symptons of mental illness and / or plain stupid. I don't do these things and I prefer to avoid people that do.

Contrary to the assertions of those lefties sadly afflicted with imbecility marriage is patently NOT a bourgiouse conspiracy. Marriage predates feudalism, it even predates civilisation so sure as the wind blows marriage predates money monopolism. Marriage is found in every civilisation and uncivilisation thoughout the world, thoughout all history and before. Marriage is as much a biological function as an adreneline rush in times of danger. The customs and traditions vary a little but the substance of marriage is the partnership of a man and woman for the purpose of mutually aiding each others reproductive objectives.

Making social policy for the purpose of attacking something so vital and fundamental to human existance as to be on a par with the need to eat and sleep is an excercise in pure lunacy.

[Someone5]

That said my personal view is as socially conservative as they come. To me necrophilia, pedophilia, sodomy, bestiality, homosexuality, promiscuity, prostitution, excessive drug abuse, gambling are all biologically incorrect, unhealthy, symptons of mental illness and / or plain stupid. I don't do these things and I prefer to avoid people that do.

If it was biologically incorrect, it wouldn't be so common in human beings.

Contrary to the assertions of those lefties sadly afflicted with imbecility marriage is patently NOT a bourgiouse conspiracy.

Elites predate capitalism too. And feudalism, for that matter. Marriage as we know it today is and ought to be meaningless, but marriage as it was defined in the past was fundamentally exploitative. Free marriage as we have today solves the exploitative aspects, but it just renders the institution meaningless. A practice in serial monogamy.

Marriage predates feudalism, it even predates civilisation so sure as the wind blows marriage predates money monopolism.

Marriage as people have come to define it certainly did not demonstrably exist "before civilization". I would also point out that marriage being old does not mean it isn't an exploitative arrangement. Free marriage--what we have today in the west, where either partner can divorce the other for any reason--isn't exploitative, but marriage as it was defined in the past certainly was. Note also; marriage itself has changed quite a lot over time. The institution itself is quite mutable.

Marriage is found in every civilisation and uncivilisation thoughout the world,

No, it certainly isn't. There are plenty of cultures without marriage as people in the west would recognize it. Unless you render marriage to the meaningless definition of semi-permanent cohabitation between a man and a woman having sex--which I don't think does your argument any favors. That's defining the term out of a useful meaning.

Marriage is as much a biological function as an adreneline rush in times of danger.

Human beings are naturally polygamous, not monogamous. That is very, very clear.

The customs and traditions vary a little but the substance of marriage is the partnership of a man and woman for the purpose of mutually aiding each others reproductive objectives.

They vary a lot, not a little. The cultural variation within the institution of marriage is quite extreme; not only between cultures, but between times as well. Marriage in, say, the United States as it was practiced in the 19th century is extremely different even from how it is practiced in the United States today--which is extremely different from, say, a traditional northern Indian marriage.

One canno0t even define a common sort of locality between marriages--meaning the family whom the married couple will live with. In the United States we practice a very strong neolocality--meaning the married couple will move off on their own--but that is extremely different from the patrilocality of the aforementioned northern Indian example--where the married couple moves in with the husband's father's extended family.

Marriage customs and expectations are widely variant between cultures.

Making social policy for the purpose of attacking something so vital and fundamental to human existance as to be on a par with the need to eat and sleep is an excercise in pure lunacy.

Marriage isn't even remotely "vital and fundamental to human existence," it is little more than a tool by which elites can more easily control populations.

[SE23]

Where do communists fall when it comes to broad social issues like gay marriage, drug legalization, abortion, civil rights for minorities etc? I assumed most communists were against social reform judging by the policies countries like North Korea, China, USSR, and Cuba enacted, but many communists on this forum seem open to social reform so I became curious to your actual stance on the matter.

Too much flexibility eventually destabilises societies to the point of collapse, there is no foundation or cohesion, as for drug legalisation, the opium epidemics which the British empire flooded into China/Hong Kong, nearly bought the country to collapse, hence why the opium wars started. Entitlements for women, different minority and religious groups, creates division and mini societies within society as a whole, with their own goals and pursuits, this eventually creates conflict, and stagnates the power of the nation. I am posting a link towards a video which highlights how so called marxist agitation groups are only there to bring about the collapse of capitalist societies, thats their intention, perhaps the middle class students who work for these "pressure" groups, don't realise this, but thats what it essentially is, ironic as soon as the socialist government takes control, these intellectuals are always the first to get lined up and shot against the wall.

[Andropov]

"Yuri Bezmenov" is a fraud and traitor who died a wealthy man by feeding clueless American conservative sheep exactly what they wanted to hear. Soviet culture was intensely conservative, promoted family values, banned homosexuality and abortion, had a strict system of meritocracy, and promoted ethnopluralism; multiculturalism, ultra-feminism, worshipping of minorities and gays, etc, are all social pathologies specifically of Western society.

[Soixante-Retard]

...gay marriage

Marriage (homosexual, heterosexual, pansexual, et cetera) per an institution of the State? Against. Marriage per a contract where the terms are agreed between, or among, consenting adults? Neutral - that's for the adults in question to decide first if they want to enter into a contract with each other or not and second what the terms of the contract are to be.

...drug legalization

Against. I do not want the State deciding what substance is permissible to use without punishment and which is not. The state has no right, in my opinion, to interfere in personal affairs.

abortion

Neutral. If a women wants to abort, the State has no right preventing this - her doctor as her agent, also, cannot prevent this but must facilitate the women's wish per the contract between the lady and the doctor. Conversely, if a women doesn't want to abort, the State has no right coercing her to abort and neither does her doctor have the right to coerce her into an abortion.

civil rights for minorities

A subset of civil rights specifically for minorities which are not extended to everyone else? Against (so I am against "affirmative action"). Civil rights for all? For.

Where do communists fall when it comes to broad social issues like...

Oops, I'm not a communist.

[SolarCross]

SE23s point about 'marxist' pressure groups working to destroy capitalism through undermining its society is surely correct. The 'reverse' is also true that a lot of these 'socialist' pressure groups advancing sodomy, abortion, promiscuity or feminism are actually funded by big crony capitalists like the Rockefellers and Rothschilde... All of us including leftists need to be wary about falling under the spell of the propaganda of these groups.

What is socialism supposed to be about really? Is it not substantially about correcting the subordination and dispossession of the working classes and not about promoting paraphilia? To the extent that working people have largely abandoned socialism it would appear that the trojan horse of paraphilic promoting 'socialism' paid for by the rockefellers has earned its funding. These trojan horse pressure groups have succeeded in alienating the working classes, who are naturally disgusted by paraphilia, from the socialist cause.

Working people (which includes the majority of the middle class who also sell their labour for a living albeit for a better price) want to get married, have children and raise a family. To the extent that 'socialism' appears to be against this natural aim it appears to be something weird, alien and hostile to their interests so of course they reject it making the crony capitalists very happy.

[SE23]

SE23s point about 'marxist' pressure groups working to destroy capitalism through undermining its society is surely correct. The 'reverse' is also true that a lot of these 'socialist' pressure groups advancing sodomy, abortion, promiscuity or feminism are actually funded by big crony capitalists like the Rockefellers and Rothschilde... All of us including leftists need to be wary about falling under the spell of the propaganda of these groups.

What is socialism supposed to be about really? Is it not substantially about correcting the subordination and dispossession of the working classes and not about promoting paraphilia? To the extent that working people have largely abandoned socialism it would appear that the trojan horse of paraphilic promoting 'socialism' paid for by the rockefellers has earned its funding. These trojan horse pressure groups have succeeded in alienating the working classes, who are naturally disgusted by paraphilia, from the socialist cause.

Working people (which includes the majority of the middle class who also sell their labour for a living albeit for a better price) want to get married, have children and raise a family. To the extent that 'socialism' appears to be against this natural aim it appears to be something weird, alien and hostile to their interests so of course they reject it making the crony capitalists very happy.

Yes i never understood what occurred here, did cultural marxism actually never take place, or was it the big cooperation's doing, or did cultural marxism did take place, and the big cooperations seized on the opportunity to shape society to make the more money, and keep hold of their monopoly ?

Personally a lot of the people who advocate this are very confused (i.e. students), they say they are liberals, were as in fact they are marxists which don't know what they are really instigating, who don't know what true socialism about. Makes me laugh, how i have come across students complaining about capitalism, and saying lets do away with money, when socialism is an economic system in itself, just a different one to the current one we have.

[The Immortal Goon]

Again, this is an old argument and nothing new.

Again, when touring this country in 1902, I met in Indianapolis an esteemed comrade who almost lost his temper with me because I expressed my belief in monogamic marriage, and because I said, as I still hold, that the tendency of civilisation is towards its perfection and completion, instead of towards its destruction. My comrade’s views, especially since the publication in The People of Bebel’s Women [4], are held by a very large number of members, but I hold, nevertheless, that they are wrong, and, furthermore, that such works and such publications are an excrescence upon the movement. The abolition of the capitalist system will, undoubtedly, solve the economic side of the Woman Question, but it will solve that alone. The question of marriage, of divorce, of paternity, of the equality of woman with man are physical and sexual questions, or questions of temperamental affiliation as in marriage, and were we living in a Socialist Republic would still be hotly contested as they are to-day. One great element of disagreement would be removed – the economic – but men and women would still be unfaithful to their vows, and questions of the intellectual equality of the sexes would still be as much in dispute as they are today, even although economic equality would be assured. To take a case in point: Suppose a man and woman married. The man after a few years ceases to love the woman, his wife, and loves another. But his wife's love for him has only increased with the passage of years, and she has borne him children. He wishes to leave her and consort with his new love. Will the fact that her economic future is secured be any solace to the deserted mother or to her children? Decidedly not! It is, a human and sexual problem, not an economic problem at all. Unjust economic conditions aggravate the evil, but do not create it. Comrade De Leon [5] says in his preface, which I have just seen, that Bebel’s Woman raises up for the proletaire, friends in the camp of the enemy. I consider that it is, on the contrary, an attempt to seduce the proletariat from the firm ground of political and economic science on to the questionable ground of physiology and sex. Instead of raising up friends in the camp of the enemy, it engenders the fatal habit of looking outside our own class for help to the members of a class – the "enemy" referred to – whose whole material interests are opposed to ours. In the days of battle will the claims of sex or the claims of their class weigh most with the ladies of the capitalist class? Bebel’s Woman is popular because of its quasi-prurient revelations of the past and present degradation of womanhood, but I question if you can find in the whole world one woman who was led to Socialism by it, but you can find hundreds who were repelled from studying Socialism by judicious extracts from its pages. I believe it is destined to be in the future a potent weapon against us in this country. And it is a weapon put into the enemy's hands without obtaining any corresponding advantage for our side. The valuable propaganda material in the book is absolutely nullified by its identification with a debatable physiological question on which the party as a whole has never been consulted, and could not be.

The opinion that “the abolition of the capitalist system will, undoubtedly solve the economic side of the Woman Question, but will solve that alone” is utopian in that it denies the controlling influence of material conditions upon any and all social institutions. What that influence is no Marxist should question. For its influence on ‘marriage,’ etc., there is the monumental work of Lewis H. Morgan – an undisputed authority in ethnic science. Here are some of his conclusions, gathered at random after a mass Of demonstrative facts:

It is impossible to overestimate the influence of property in the civilisation of mankind.

After the experience of several thousand years it (property) caused the abolition of slavery upon the discovery that a freeman was a better property – making machine.

The monogamian family owes its origin to property ... The growth of the idea of property in the human mind ... is intimately connected with the establishment of this form of the family.

The whole work abounds with illustrations that revolutionised ethnology and furnished Marxian sociology with its irrefutable ethnic basis, going to show that the tenderest affections and sentiments – physical, sexual and mental – have developed along the line of and in the measure that material conditions made them possible. This thirty-third edition of Bebel’s Woman, planted squarely on Morgan, supplementing Morgan with Marx, and weaving in the historic connection of marital relations, has an educational propagandistic value which no amount of actual or imaginary thorns that may attach to the stalk of that rose can nullify. No wonder the S.L.P. never went through the superfluous trouble of consulting or voting upon the essential merits of this cannonball fired through the web of lies that the spokesmen and candle-holders of the usurping class have woven and seek to stuff the human intellect with.

In the first place, I have long been of opinion that the Socialist movement elsewhere was to a great extent hampered by the presence in its ranks of faddists and cranks, who were in the movement, not for the cause of Socialism, but because they thought they saw in it a means of ventilating their theories on such questions as sex, religion, vaccination, vegetarianism, etc., and I believed that such ideas had or ought to have no place in our programme or in our party. I held that, if under the Socialist Republic individuals desired to have a Freethinker’s propagandist, a Jewish Rabbi, a mesmerist, a Catholic priest, a Salvation captain, a professional clown, or a Protestant divine, they would be perfectly free to maintain them for any of these purposes provided that society was reimbursed for the loss of their labour. In other words, that Socialism was compatible with the greatest intellectual freedom, or even freakishness. And that, therefore, we were as a body concerned only with the question of political and economic freedom for our class. We could not claim to have a mission to emancipate the human mind from all errors, for the simple reason that we were not and are not the repositories of all truth. These simple propositions, as they appear to me, I saw to be neglected by the tendency on the part of the European Socialists as a whole to make their press and platform the stumping ground for every idea that had the distinction of being unconventional or in any manner a protest against established ideas. But in the press and platform of the Socialist Labour Party of the United States I found that this tendency was very faint indeed, and that they, in their own felicitous phrase, borrowed from. the days of backwoods tree-felling, ‘hewed close to the line’ of the class struggle, and would not allow themselves to be seduced into any more speculative theories,

Our editor, comrade Daniel DeLeon, is a case in point of this fidelity to the singleness of purpose required for our work. I give a few short extracts from his writings illustrative of his stand on these matters most frequently a snare to others. We all know how insidiously writers like Bebel, Bax and others have striven to link Socialism with hostility to the monogamic marriage system, and how sedulously the idea has been spread that Socialists are bound in principle to have a solution for the Mormon question.

When a London member of that moribund organisation, the S.D.F., Edith Lanchester, ‘took up’ with a comrade without the formality of marriage, I remember how all the English so-called Socialist papers flew to her defence, as if her act was a Socialist act. And in America, when a Mr. Herron abandoned one wife to take comfort in another, the same class of papers held the same attitude, viz., that we as Socialists held special views on the marriage question. The work of Bebel on Woman treats this matter in the same way. Now, how does Comrade DeLeon treat the matter? In The Weekly People, June 22, 1901, we find in the Letter Box this brusque and correct answer to an enquirer: ‘F.H.’ Troy, N.Y.

... is it not queering Socialism to take ... the position that justifies the notion that the sexual or matrimonial question is a cardinal Socialist question, when, in fact, Socialism has nothing to do with it.

The italics are mine, but the words as quoted are Comrade DeLeon’s own. In them he exactly voices my sentiments.

And again, Lenin and Trotsky both agreed with Connolly in that there was no real way to make proletarian culture.

Stalin thought otherwise and engineered an art form and ideal conditions for the family to be enforced, as conservative as they were.

[SolarCross]

SE23 - I think (but don't know for sure) that cultural marxism, as you call it, is entirely the handiwork of elements of the ruling class. As the OP noted social 'progressive' movements are entirely absent in actual marxist states. Moreover they are entirely absent in genuinely working class, grassroot or populist movements throughout history before and after marx.

But some people (perhaps especially students) do jump on social progressive bandwagons without really knowing who is the driver or their motivation.

Some people assert that the USSR sponsored some of these bandwagons for the purpose of undermining capitalist society. In the case of the civil rights movement in the US which was mainly concerned with racial segregation that is probably true. Of the more perverse movements I am dubious of USSR sponsorship I think it more probable that the bandwagon ringleaders just claimed to be sponsored by the USSR in order to get credibility and also disguise the real origins of their support.

[Dagoth Ur]

gay marriage

Like most of the other communists I reject the premise of marriage, however I'm not opposed to the ceremony of it but rather it deserves no legal recognition (which is just a measure designed to drive people into marriage). Anyone can have whatever kind of bonding ceremony they want to.

drug legalization

Full and total legalization, that means free as well, distributed by state clinics that provide education and rehabilitation. Drug dealers like all black marketeers must be exterminated and undercut.

abortion

Unconditional support.

civil rights for minorities etc?

Civil rights? Like what? Rights are a nonsensical premise. Suffice to say we aim to destroy the very notion of a minority.

I assumed most communists were against social reform judging by the policies countries like North Korea, China, USSR, and Cuba enacted, but many communists on this forum seem open to social reform so I became curious to your actual stance on the matter.

um you realize what these places were like before?

and since Communists love to reduce everything to "Communism or Capitalism" it was therefor some form of Capitalism.

lol wrong. Maybe you just talk to dumb "capitalism bad" commies but no everything unsocialist/lesser socialist is capitalism. The USSR wasn't capitalist until '91, and the DPRK was never capitalist.

I consider cultural liberalism, whether in the USSR or in the USA, whether of Alexander Yakovlev or of Sustan Sontag, to be a Hegelian antithesis of the status-quo, a socio-cultural pathology that threatens to subvert and destroy the host culture's ideals and values.

Well you're wrong. America is a purely liberal country. It's our guiding ideology and always has been. The victory of liberalism in the USSR was the victory of American Capitalism. Our Western Culture IS CAPITALISM.

Contrary to the assertions of those lefties sadly afflicted with imbecility marriage is patently NOT a bourgiouse conspiracy. Marriage predates feudalism, it even predates civilisation so sure as the wind blows marriage predates money monopolism. Marriage is found in every civilisation and uncivilisation thoughout the world, thoughout all history and before. Marriage is as much a biological function as an adreneline rush in times of danger. The customs and traditions vary a little but the substance of marriage is the partnership of a man and woman for the purpose of mutually aiding each others reproductive objectives..

Nobody said marriage is a product of capitalism it's just another renovated wing of Private Property. Capitalism invented very little when it comes to controlling the people.

[Conscript]

Whenever I've asked a Communist why the USSR collapsed, the answer is pretty much always "it wasn't socialist enough", and since Communists love to reduce everything to "Communism or Capitalism" it was therefor some form of Capitalism.

It's useless to point this out if it can b proven, and not by moving goalposts.

[Rei Murasame]

The victory of liberalism in the USSR was the victory of American Capitalism. Our Western Culture IS CAPITALISM.

Pretty much. I don't understand why Andropov (and others like him) keeps talking about 'defending the West'. 'The West' is not a location, it's an idea and a system. 'The West' itself is the problem.