My understanding is that there were two debates going on (which I think got
confused, too easily). One was a debate between whether the term was a
generalized of (and thus with examples from) real identifiable "communist
states," versus an ideal term which could be used in comparative politics,
but which itself is an abstract concept. The second debate was whether the
term should be defined and described as it is used by political scientists
(or even more narrowly, by political scientists specializing in comparative
politics), or whether the article should accommodate a variety of
definitions or usages by a variety of people.
Personally, with regards to debate #1 I appreciate the value of both
approaches and would favor an article that has both. I think many others
are intensely divided over this, though.
With regards to debate #2 I strongly favor the second approach; I believe
that the second approach would also accommodate both sides in the first
debate. It is my sense, however, that some participants, especially JTDIRL
and 172, favor the first approach. Although I adisagree with them I have
no fundamental objection as long as the article itself makes that approach
clear (which it does).
Steve
At 01:08 PM 5/23/2003 -0600, you wrote:
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(a)juno.com
Reply-To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 18:03:38 GMT
To: wikien-l(a)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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