Thread by @thltd_

Thread: The history of Communism & Communist ideology.

Genealogy covering every major strain of Communism from Utopian Socialism to modern Cultural Marxism or "wokeness."

I'll try to keep this brief but there's 200+ years to cover, so no promises.

Socialism is an outgrowth of the most radical factions of the French Revolution.

French Liberalism differed from Anglo Liberalism due to their focus on egalitarianism.

Anglos thought this madness & anarchy, were not fans of Jacobins (even G. Washington: archive.vn/bTWyY)

Marx credited the French Revolutionary Noel Baboeuf's Conspiracy of the Equals as "giving rise to the Communist idea" and described them as "the first appearance of a truly active Communist party."

TL;DR: They wanted even more violent revolution for total equality.

A common myth is that Marx somehow "ruined" based and trad original Socialism.

"Utopian" (Pre-Marxist) Socialists were already promoting feminism, anti-"racism," sexual promiscuity, anti-nationalism, technocracy, etc. - e.g. Saint Simonianists, "Patriarchs of Socialism" (Marx)

In 1848, Marx laid out the basic aims of Communism via the Communist Manifesto:

Abolition of property, nation, family, religion, & all traditional culture, + the creation of a centralized, technocracy; centralized banking, transport, education, communication, etc.

The core of Marxism is conflict theory. TL;DR: Historical progress is driven by conflict between "oppressors" and "oppressed."

Important to note that Communism is not & has never been a static ideology. It's evolutionary, constantly mutating, adapting to changing circumstances.

Leninism is an updated version of Orthodox Marxism, Marxism-Leninism (aka Stalinism) is an updated version of Leninism, Maoism is an updated version of Stalinism, and so on.

Followers of each strain constantly accuse all others of being "revisionists" aka "not real Communists."

Anyway, back to the history:

1800s Socialists organized via "International Workingmen's Associations," an outgrowth of labor unions.

The First International was founded 1864, but split in 1876 due to conflict between anarchists & statists.

The Second International was founded 1889 by which point Marxism was the dominant strain of Socialism.

They advocated violent revolution opposed to the incrementalist approach of e.g. Fabians but agreed on core principles.

Zero practical difference between Communism & Socialism

Marx theorized that industrial "workers" would instinctively rise up & violently overthrow the "Capitalists" (current European elite), then create a "dictatorship of the proletariat."

This was debunked by WW1. Workers were nationalists & fought for their respective countries.

So, Commies created vanguard parties (e.g. Lenin's Bolsheviks) to lead the Communist "World Revolution."

This took place across Europe from 1917-1923, was coordinated via the Communist International and largely directed by Bolsheviks.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_rev…

It only succeeded in non-industrialized Russia (again debunking Marx who claimed Communism would naturally arise out of industrial Capitalism).

Immediately after revolution, Leninist USSR legalized LGBT, feminism, criminalized "racism," etc. - 1st "hate speech" laws in history.

Imagine current "woke" society but with more violence and genocide.

A major innovation that Lenin (+Trotsky+Stalin) introduced to Marxism was "anti-imperialism," promoting the overthrow of White empires/colonies; i.e. "Third Worldism" (anachronistic description, still accurate).

Leninist USSR tried to invade Germany via Poland to assist the German Communist Revolution, but was defeated 1921 in the Polish-Soviet War.

Lenin believed that non-industrialized USSR would fail without capturing industrialized Germany.

Lenin died 1924. Stalin took over & aimed to establish USSR as a base of Commie operations under his policy of "socialism in one country."

This was *not* the same thing as nationalism. USSR was still systemically anti-"racist" and multiethnic.

Delusional Trotsky still wanted World Revolution. He was exiled 1929 and later assassinated by USSR hitman.

Trotsky was influential on the Anti-Stalinist Left (e.g. SocDems) who thought USSR was too oppressive.

These people have power now and are, of course, just as oppressive.

Stalin undid Lenin's :LGBT stuff & some of the feminism because society was verging on collapse & he needed men to fight WW2.

This is why Warsaw Pact had no LGBT stuff & minimal feminism, not because "Communism is innately conservative." Stalinist USSR was still very libtarded.

"Keep this brief" - famous last words...

Rewinding to the interwar period, Marxists in the West were coping & seething because the World Revolution failed.

They concluded that workers were infected with "false consciousness" (patriotism, nationalism, conservatism, family values, religion, etc).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_con…

Since workers were "too brainwashed," Western Commies put economics on the back burner and began to develop Cultural Marxism (aka Western Marxism).

CM is a strategy to, in the words of Georgy Lukacs, "destroy society" by attacking traditional culture - still very Marxist.

The Institute for Social Research was the main Western Marxist think tank, founded 1929 at Goethe University Frankfurt (hence "Frankfurt School").

When Nazis took power 1933, the Frankfurt School fled to Geneva (location of League of Nations HQ), then America.

In 1935, the FS joined Columbia University, which was already infested with Commies (e.g. Franz Boas) & other Leftists.

They published a journal called "Studies in Philosophy and Social Science."

Many FS thinkers took influence from freaks like Freud and Wilhelm Reich.

Famous Frankfurt School works include:

Eros and Civilization, 1955 - "society is evil because it isn't sexually degenerate."

The Authoritarian Personality, 1950 - "people are Right-Wing because they are secretly gay and fear being castrated by their fathers."

(img: more Boas)

Some FS thinkers were hired by the OSS (CIA predecessor) to work on "DeNazification" programs, some others were Soviet agents.

Either way, all Western Marxists took particular interest in dismantling "Nazi stuff" like nationalism, "racism," "sexism," and "homophobia."

So, loving your country, your people, believing in traditional gender roles, practicing sexual morality, being religious, etc. are all very bad and oppressive and evil Capitalist tricks and so on.

FS gained big influence among Leftists in US and UK, with British Marxists founding their own "Cultural Studies" in the 1950s.

UK's Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, founded 1964 by a future Assistant Director-General of UN's UNESCO, was known as the "Birmingham School."

As an aside, UK already had a big subversive Socialist scene that had infected their intelligentsia and politics since the late 1800s. UK's Fabian Socialists were influential on UN's ideology.

Stuff to read:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_m…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellowshi…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_W…

Late 1960s German Commies coined a subversion strategy called "long march through the institutions [of power]" - referencing the ChiCom Long March (covering ChiComs later).

Marcuse of the FS said that this is "the only effective way" for Communists to seize power in the West.

The Western Marxist 'long march' was mass infiltration of academia, media, law, schools, political parties, corporations, etc. to acquire "cultural hegemony" (theory coined by the early Western Marxist Antonio Gramsci).

Today we see the results - total "wokeness" infestation.

By the 1970s, Western Marxism had spread internationally, thanks in part to British "Cultural Studies."

As a result, Western Marxists interacted with thinkers from a variety of Leftist disciplines (e.g. Marxism-derived Postmodernism) and absorbed some of their ideas/theories.

By the late 1970s and early 80s, the "Civil Rights" Revolution (driven by Commies & other Leftoids) had "succeeded" in the West.

Except it didn't, because inequality naturally still existed. So, Leftists had to invent new theories to explain why this was the case, e.g. CRT.

I won't cover "intersectionality" etc in detail because this thread is already way too long.

The basic idea is that every "minority" is a "victim" of straight White men so must band together to overthrow them.

More important to cover the geopolitical developments that coincided with these ideological developments.

WW2 resulted in the destabilization of European colonial power, already weakened by WW1.

Socialist decolonization revolutions began almost immediately after the war ended.

Some of these wars lasted until the 1990s.

Third World Revolutionaries were armed & trained by USSR & CCP (often led by USSR operatives, not sure about CCP), and often backed by Globalist-controlled Western nations.

Colonial governments didn't lose a single war but were forced to decolonize by combined economic warfare & political pressure from the globalist West and East.

These decolonization revolutions coincided with other Commie revolutions worldwide, e.g. the Central American Crisis.

Anti-colonialism and anti-"racism" (again, introduced by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin) became central to Marxist doctrine, thanks in part due to ChiCom influence.

FINALLY, onto the ChiComs.

Background info:

China was agrarian, full of illiterate peasants.

The Chinese Communist Party was founded 1921 under supervision of Bolshevik ComIntern official Grigori Voitinsky.

CCP fought a civil war vs nationalist KMT during 1927-37 & 1945-49.

37-45 was a brief intermission, both fought the Japanese during 2nd Sino-Japanese War.

In 1943, Harry Dexter White (U.S. Treasury department official, major architect of the IMF, and Soviet spy) denied a $200,000,000 loan to nationalist China.

[FDR regime was full of Commies].

This caused runaway inflation collapsing the middle-class (the nationalists' main support base) and increased CCP popularity.

Mao became CCP chairman in 1945. CCP won the civil war in 1949 and founded the People's Republic of China.

The Sino-Soviet split began in the 50s and 60s because the USSR promoted peaceful coexistence with the West.

In typical Communist style, the CCP declared that the Soviets were "revisionists" (aka "not real Communists") and unsuitable to lead global Commie Revolution.

In 1974 Mao developed the "Three Worlds Theory."

TL;DR: Workers outside of the "Third World" (defined by Mao as Asia, Africa, and Latin America) are too wealthy and decadent to embrace communism, so Third Worldism is the only viable path to world revolution.

Maoist Third Worldists also generally claim that non-Third World workers are materially privileged via colonialism / imperialism, participate in second-hand oppression of Third World people, and thus are "not real proletarians."

Easy to see the Maoist influence on modern Cultural/Western Marxism:

Extreme focus on Third Worldism and non-White peoples, the idea that certain demographics are "not real proletarians" because they are second-hand oppressors, etc.

And "Cultural Revolution," of course.

As previously covered, these ideas didn't exclusively come from Maoism, but Chinese Communism definitely contributed to the Leftism we see today.

Now I've ran out of steam and lost my train of thought.

One clarification to make regarding the "long march" so people don't get confused: It had already begun long before the 1960s.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, Communists had already infiltrated academia before WW1, Franz Boas being the prime example.

https://twitter.com/th_l_t_d_/status/1647028854710566914

Marcuse didn't command a legion of Communists to suddenly zerg rush everything. They were already doing it.

The Ethical Movement, while not explicitly Communist, was a sort of proto-Cultural Marxism involving Leftists of many varieties, incl. Socialists: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_m…

Another good example is World League for Sexual Reform:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Lea…

"Long march" is just a handy term to describe all leftist infiltration of institutions etc., & Marcuse a good example of a leading Marxist thinker explicitly saying "mass infiltration is how we win."