At 12:08 PM -0400 28/11/2000, Darryl Shannon wrote:
>Well, we allow communists to run as well. Although TWO communist
>parties seems a little much. Ah well, at least that gives Gord a
>choice....(:3=
That was Manifestly uncalled for. :p I'd say that earned a black marx
beside your name, boyo. :)
>What I can't understand is why these parties run under the communist
>name. Why don't they call themselves social democrats, or even
>socialists?
That is exactly what the strongly Marxist early New Democratic Party (NDP
for short) did, way back when.
>Even neo-nazi parties don't call themselves neo-nazi, they
>call themselves a national party or some such.
*grin* In Canada, the Canadian Alliance Party... *ahem*
>You'd think that after
>all of communisms horrible crimes against humanity they'd try to
>downplay their link to it.
Then again, nobody seems to think of British coalmine-employed children
with blacklung or crashed ecologies all over the world when one hears the
word "industrial", does one? Does one think of scammed elections and mass
fraud when one hears the word "democracy"?
That was meant to be a note about sensitized perception, by the way, not a
defense of Stalin. [Just in case some sharptoothed sweatshop-lover wanted
to pounce me over it.] I think that there is some kind of heritage of
McCarthyism that makes the word a lot dirtier in in the US consciousness
than in some other places. In my experience in Canada, Communism is more
laughable among the mainstreamer and non-academics and, for the value of so
many materialist critics and theorists, Marxist thought remains important
among humanities and social-sciences academics of all stripes for the
questions it raises and, for most mainstream and leftist humanities
academics it is also especially for its ability to diagnose to some
degree, although far less for any imagined or real ability to treat what is
diagnosed.
