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From: kriz@skat.usc.edu (Dennis Kriz)
Newsgroups: news.misc,talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.soviet
Subject: Re: Beyond Perestroika
Message-ID: <16312@oberon.USC.EDU>
Date: 5 Apr 89 06:53:24 GMT
References: <3982@kremvax.mosc.cccp> <1658@orion.cf.uci.edu> <16287@oberon.USC.EDU> <822@tekbspa.UUCP>
Sender: news@oberon.USC.EDU
Reply-To: kriz@skat.usc.edu (Dennis Kriz)
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Lines: 35

Lets kick one more tenant of Marxism while we're at it.  The view that Marx
somehow invented socialism or the idea of communism is also a crock.

Throughout history there have been many traditions/movements which were 
communal in nature ... 

Anyone who's heard of the "Tolstoyan farm" knows this to be so.  The philosophy
behind it, first put forward by Tolstoy and later expounded heavily upon by
Gandhi.  It blends the thoughts of Thorough, Tolstoy and Gandhi into an 
approach to simple communal living.  The book by Shumacher "Small is Beautiful"
can probably be considered a prodigy of this tradition.

The Kibbutzes in Israel are cummunal, as was Qum Ran (the ancient community 
which produced the Dead Sea Scrolls).

The early Christian communities (when they were being fed to the lions) were
communal.  Even today, there have got to be thousands of communal/semicommunal
homes being run by Christian groups in this country alone... and that excludes
the most obvious (the monastaries/convents).

There are also probably thousands of humanist based operations of the same type
too.

The point of all this is that communal living is not something that Marx 
dreamed up.  Every society has always been at least partially communal.  The
difference is ... is that these communities were always small and almost 
always voluntary.

So communal homes and communities will almost certainly continue to exist
in bliss... with or without Marxist dogma.  But this is not some victory 
for Marx ... because it's always been that way ... and in a free society 
there's no one telling people that they can't organize their lives together
if they want.

                                        dennis