[WikiEN-l] Please, no more personal attacks

[Fred Bauder]

Part of the negative material which I and Cuntator struggled to include in
the article, "Communist State" did concern the practical political science
aspects of the governmental system, specifically, rule and control of
information by the politbureau. This was found just as objectionable as any
other negative material regarding the Communist state. In fact, there was
such a hypercritical attitude that they actually took issue with the
spelling of "politbureau", preferring the transliterated cyrillic version,
"politboro". (Both are correct in English).

I don't think they liked the notion that members of the party were the
ruling class either.

Hard to say what they were thinking in detail, they simply deleted it all.

Fred

> From: jlk7e at juno.com
> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 18:03:38 GMT
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Please, no more personal attacks
> 
> 
> My first post to the mailing list...
> 
> Reading all the discussions back and forth over "Communist state" and
> "Communist government" (but not participating in them), I'd note that the
> current mailing list understanding of what was supposed to be accomplished by
> the former article is in error.
> 
> The idea of the Communist state page, as I understand it, is that there is a
> particular type of governmental system called a "Communist state", practiced
> in the USSR, its satellites, the PRC, etc. etc.  This governmental system is
> characterized by certain things, such as the entwining of the state with the
> Communist party, and the embrace of Marxist-Leninist ideology.  Political
> scientists use the term "Communist state" to refer to this type of
> governmental system.  I believe this is the argument that was put forth by
> jtd, 172, and others (although they should correct me if I'm mischaracterizing
> them).
> 
> They felt, further, that this article was an inappropriate place to discuss
> other aspects of communism in practice, seeing as those could go in articles
> about Communism, or something else (Communist government was a makeshift
> solution, from what I recall), while the state definition could *only* go in
> Communist state.  As such, the type-of-government discussion would get
> cluttered by being filled with lots of discussion of all the bad things
> communists have done, which could be discussed at numerous other articles.
> 
> I'm not sure that I agree with this fully - the term "Communist state" is
> susceptible to more gradations of meaning than "Constitutional monarchy", or
> what not.  But it's a fairly reasonable opinion, in my view.  Furthermore,
> what it is not is a distinction between the communist state in theory and the
> communist state in practice.  Both "Communist state" and "Communist
> government" deal with communism in practice, just in different ways.  In
> particular, Communist state would deal with the practice of Communism in
> regards to the structure of the form of government.  (The theory of how a
> communist state should function would be rather different, at least for
> Marxist-Leninists, who viewed what political scientists call a "Communist
> state" as a stop-gap on the way to true communism)
> 
> That's all for now
> 
> John Kenney
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