>At the risk of oversimplification, Lenin was about the Party, It is easy, and quite common, to confuse function with worldview. Marxism is a worldview. Communism, in its several varieties, is an implementation. So is socialism, whether the milder US type or the more stringent system of the Social Democrats.
Having been schooled in the world of the 1960s along with "Imagine" people think that communism == communalism (eg "there's never been a communist state") and living for the moment. They forget that someone has to enforce this worldview. Like Pol Pot & Idi Amin. >If you think Obama is a Marxist, you live in a world of very strange definitions indeed. As a matter of worldview I know of no academic, even on the left, who denies it. The only denial is at the popular level. >We should stick to cameras and looking at pictures here and do our spitting on people elsewhere. Actually, I live in a world where people regularly engage in heated yet dispassionate discussions of such topics. It's not demeaning to anyone. But I must remember that not all people are equally dispassionate. Sometimes these discussions are taken personally and affect the opinions of others. My opinions of those who disagree with me are not at all negative. I hold nobody in low regard for political or philosophical reasons. (For that matter, the two most recent philosophers I've been reading were Marxists -- Thomas Kuhn & Paul Feyerabend.) Meanwhile back at the ranch ... I'm thinking of spending some time in the darkroom this weekend. Did some tool porn of hand planes this fall and it's time to make some prints. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
