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| Source:Russia Today- Amiri Baraka talking to President Vladimir Putin's Russia Today, about communism and socialism. |
"RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Russian state-controlled[1] international television network funded by the federal tax budget of the Russian government.[15][16] It operates pay television channels directed to audiences outside of Russia, as well as providing Internet content in English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, and Russian.
RT is a brand of TV-Novosti, an "autonomous non-profit organization" founded by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti in April 2005.[10][17] During the economic crisis in December 2008, the Russian government, headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, included ANO "TV-Novosti" on its list of core organizations of strategic importance to Russia.[18][19][20] RT operates as a multilingual service with channels in five languages: the original English-language channel was launched in 2005, the Arabic-language channel in 2007, Spanish in 2009, German in 2014 and French in 2017. RT America (since 2010),[21] RT UK (since 2014) and other regional channels also produce local content. RT is the parent company of the Ruptly video agency,[5][6][7] which owns the Redfish video channel and the Maffick digital media company.[8][9]
RT has been described as a major propaganda outlet for the Russian government and its foreign policy.[2] Academics, fact-checkers, and news reporters (including some current and former RT reporters) have identified RT as a purveyor of disinformation[42] and conspiracy theories.[48] UK media regulator Ofcom has repeatedly found RT to have breached its rules on impartiality, including multiple instances in which RT broadcast "materially misleading" content.[55] RT's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan compared the channel to the Ministry of Defence and stated that it was "waging an information war, and with the entire Western world".[16][56] In September 2017, RT America was ordered to register as a "foreign agent" with the United States Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.[57] RT has been banned in Ukraine since 2014,[58] and in Latvia[59] and Lithuania[60] since 2020."
From Wikipedia
"Amiri Baraka, a poet and political activist, spoke with RT about communism as a perfect system, as well as about detainee torture in the US and reasons behind America not preventing the 9/11 tragedy."
From Russia Today
"Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal')[1][2] is a philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose ultimate goal is the establishment of a communist society, namely a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money,[3][4] and the state.[5][6] As such, communism is a specific form of socialism.
Communism includes a variety of schools of thought which broadly include Marxism and anarcho-communism as well as the political ideologies grouped around both, all of which share the analysis that the current order of society stems from capitalism, its economic system and mode of production, namely that in this system there are two major social classes, the relationship between these two classes is exploitative, and that this situation can only ultimately be resolved through a social revolution.[7] The two classes are the proletariat (the working class), who make up the majority of the population within society and must work to survive; and the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class), a small minority who derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, revolution would put the working class in power and in turn establish social ownership of the means of production which is the primary element in the transformation of society towards communism.[7]
After 1917, a number of states were identified as communist: these states espoused Marxism–Leninism or a variation of it.[8] Along with social democracy, communism became the dominant political tendency within the international socialist movement by the 1920s.[9] The emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally communist state led to communism's widespread association with Marxism–Leninism and the Soviet economic model.[1][a][10] While the term "communist state" is used by Western historians, political scientists and media to refer to countries ruled by communist parties, these states themselves did not describe themselves as communist or claim to have achieved communism: they referred to themselves as socialist states that are in the process of constructing socialism.[11][12][13][14] Terms used by communist states include national-democratic, people's democratic, socialist-oriented and workers and peasants' states.[15] Some economists and intellectuals argue that, in practice, the model under which these nominally communist states operated was in fact a form of state capitalism[16][17][18] or a non-planned administrative or command economy[19][20] and not an actual communist economic model in accordance with most accepted definitions of “communism” as an economic theory."
From Wikipedia
"Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict as well as a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. It originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, there is currently no single definitive Marxist theory.[1]
Some Marxist schools of thought place greater emphasis on certain aspects of classical Marxism while rejecting or modifying other aspects. Some schools have sought to combine Marxian concepts and non-Marxian concepts which has then led to contradictory conclusions.[2] It has been argued that there is a movement toward the recognition of historical and dialectical materialism as the fundamental conceptions of all Marxist schools of thought.[3] This view is rejected by some post-Marxists such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who claim that history is not only determined by the mode of production, but also by consciousness and will.[4]
Marxism has had a profound impact on global academia, having influenced many fields, including anthropology,[5][6] archaeology, art theory, criminology, cultural studies, economics, education, ethics, film theory, geography, historiography, literary criticism, media studies,[7][8] philosophy, political science, psychology, science studies,[9] sociology, urban planning and theater."
From Wikipedia
"Leninism is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party, as the political prelude to the establishment of communism. The function of the Leninist vanguard party is to provide the working classes with the political consciousness (education and organisation) and revolutionary leadership necessary to depose capitalism in the Russian Empire (1721–1917).[1] Leninist revolutionary leadership is based upon The Communist Manifesto (1848) identifying the communist party as "the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country; that section which pushes forward all others." As the vanguard party, the Bolsheviks viewed history through the theoretical framework of dialectical materialism, which sanctioned political commitment to the successful overthrow of capitalism, and then to instituting socialism; and, as the revolutionary national government, to realize the socio-economic transition by all means.[2]
In the aftermath of the October Revolution (1917), Leninism was the dominant version of Marxism in Russia and the basis of Soviet Democracy, the rule of directly elected soviets. In establishing the socialist mode of production in Bolshevik Russia—with the Decree on Land (1917), war communism (1918–1921), and the New Economic Policy (1921–1928)—the revolutionary régime suppressed most political opposition, including Marxists who opposed Lenin's actions, the anarchists and the Mensheviks, factions of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.[3] The Russian Civil War (1917–1922), which included the seventeen-army Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War (1917–1925), and left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks (1918–1924) were the external and internal wars which transformed Bolshevik Russia into the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR), the core republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).[4]
As revolutionary praxis, Leninism originally was neither a proper philosophy nor a discrete political theory. Leninism comprises politico-economic developments of orthodox Marxism and Lenin's interpretations of Marxism, which function as a pragmatic synthesis for practical application to the actual conditions (political, social, economic) of the post-emancipation agrarian society of Imperial Russia in the early 20th century.[1] As a political-science term, Lenin's theory of proletarian revolution entered common usage at the fifth congress of the Communist International (1924), when Grigory Zinoviev applied the term Leninism to denote "vanguard-party revolution."[1] The term Leninism was accepted as part of CPSU's vocabulary and doctrine around 1922, and in January 1923, despite objections from Lenin, it entered the public vocabulary."
From Wikipedia
Amiri Baraka makes the classic leftist-socialist argument that Communist states really aren't Communist states and what's practiced in those countries really isn't communism. That the Soviet Union of Russia really wasn't a Communist State and I guess the People's Republic of China really isn't a Communist State today either. Well, there' partially right about the PRC because a lot of the Chinese economy is now in private hands and the Chinese are somewhat free to move about their own country and even travel to other countries and oversees.
But if you look at how communism is practiced in the 20th Century and is still practiced today like in the Communist Republic of Korea and in the Castro Republic of Cuba, at the very least the Leninist (named after Russian Communist leader Vladimir Lenin) version of communism is the Communist philosophy that was practiced in the 20th Century and in some cases still practiced today, where the state (meaning the national government) owns and operates the entire country. And the people are really just there to serve the national government. And the more valuable they are the state, the better lives that they'll have in that country.
What Amiri Baraka was talking about in this Russia Today interview was democratic socialism. Which is socialist state and economy, but where the leaders are democratically elected and where the people are free to live their own lives. Which isn't much different from the social democracies of Canada and Europe, but at least according to this interview Mr. Barack seems even to left of those social democracies and talking about nationalization of current American private industries.
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