- Capitalism and Alternatives -

Angola abandonmed marxism in 1991

In Reply to: The Needle posted by Dr. Cruel on August 02, 1999 at 12:06:00:

: Which is what Reagan's policy was all about, after all.

You seem to like to call any government you dissaprove of 'Marxist" or "communist". Maybe I'mm being obtuse, but can i see some actual evidence that the MPLA is in fact communist? It was my impression that they abandoned Marxism in 1990 or so, and since then have been just another governing party with no ideology other than corruption and greed. Since many "communist' states had very little tod o in any objective sense with either Marxism or pre-marxian cpommunist structures, the accepted convention for a long time has been to call a government Communist if it calls itself Communist. this is the only meanoingful sense in which you could call China, the SU, kerala, etc. 'Comunist" parties- they were Communist because tehy upheld the goals of a communist society and devoted theselves to acheiving these goals. If the MPLA found comumunism too hard or demanding, and has since abandoned the desire to acheive communist goals, by what logic can they be called communist? Or do you have soem objective definitipn of communsim that excludes the democratic experiments and includes regimes as disp[arate as post- 1991 Angola and North Korea. If so, i'd liek to see it. As a final note, since Angola abandoned any claimn to vbe a genuine leftist state years ago, as a "strident member of the left" I see little reason to defend them. Ditto North Korea, though I think it's shameful that we're denying their people food to ea. Did you knwo that Kim IlSung joined the KWP as a strict opportunistisc movce, to get Sovviet patronage, and was never a genuine communist in the first place?

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