this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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These discussions on communism vs capitalism that devolve into comparing the US with the USSR are like discussing feudalism vs liberalism in 1825, when the only perceptible legacies of the French Revolution were the Reign of Terror and Napoleon's degeneration into monarchy.
If you're sensibly anticapitalist, for the love of Marx do not argue in favor of states that rejected all pretension of wanting to let the economy be democratically managed, ultimately turning into party-controlled hierarchies rather than socialism. If you're a liberal in 1825 and rather than arguing in favor of ending serfdom and enfranchising everyone you keep going on about how Robespierre wasn't really that bad, you're politically useless.
I'm always confused at how people think communism and democracy are opposites. The indoctrination is crazy. They're not even the same category of thing. Communism is an economic model where democracy is just about how leadership is decided. They can exist in the same country at the same time.
Communist theory explicitly tries to dispel the idea that political and economic structures are separate things. As such, communists intend to create democratic structures that can distribute resources in place of undemocratic market relationships which empower owners of capital.
Liberalism on the other hand believe that market relationships are inherently democratic. Therefore they may think that any attempt to replace them with a planned economy are undemocratic regardless of how such planning would be decided upon.
Ahhh right, but that's not to say that the types of underlying structures aren't interchangeable. Are you saying that communism is necessarily democratic?
Yes, most communists and especially Marxists believe communism must necessarily be fully democratic. It’s certainly true though that there is much debate about what types of democratic structures to use. Although most communists would probably agree that it would require a lot of trial and error to find an ideal system.
That said, communists generally seek to disenfranchise owners of capital from the decision making process up until the point they no longer exist as a class. Therefore in the transition to communism, full democracy may not be realized. This is the given reason for why Marxist Leninist countries generally suppress opposition parties but may allow for political affinity organizations around identity groups that suffer under capitalism, ie worker, youth, women’s organizations, etc.
So is the idea that the dictator scene is supposed to be an in between step?
Well Marx used the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” to describe how a transition would work in opposition to what he saw as the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”.
However, if you’re talking about people like Stalin or Mao, you’ll find self proclaimed communists with a wide variety of opinions on the subject. That’s in part because gets difficult to sort propaganda from the truth of the matter. I also mean both western and communist propaganda. To have a guy going by “Joe Steel” as the leader of your republic of socialist workers councils isn’t exactly a subtle attempt to get buy in from working class people.
I think a lot of Marxists take sympathy with Lenin, and Lenin's vision, they don't necessarily like what the USSR became under Stalin. The principles of Soviet Democracy, for example, are appealing to many Lefitsts. "All power to the Soviets!"
That being said, ultimately the USSR serves as a great example of why Vanguardism can be good in overthrowing a bad system, but must be held far more accountable, or even dissolve after revolution. I know many MLs would probably shit on me for saying that, citing the CIA paper saying Stalin wasn't a dictator, but I still think ultimately the form of government under Stalin and those who came after him is very dependent on who is in power. A more decentralized system would have checks against such issues.
My 2 cents as a leftist that isn't an ML, but has spent time reading about the various leftist tendencies.
I'll conclude it by saying I would have loved it if Lenin continued to live and stay in power, I wonder what the USSR would have looked like, maybe even today.
Lenin's State and Revolution is great and set the foundations for the Bolshevik discourse that led to them being capable of leading a movement large enough to gain power over Russia, the problem is that not even Lenin himself was consistent with the principles he proposed. The idea that you can legitimately sustain some sort of pretension of achieving worker democracy when the Bolsheviks consistently ended up repressing all other leftist factions wasn't coherent, to the point that Stalin wasn't a sad degeneration of Leninist practice, but a necessary consequence.
We unfortunately see the same result in almost all countries that followed the ML model, where a party elite ends up monopolizing power and divorcing itself from the rest of society, ultimately instituting themselves as a separate class that sees no ideological issue with bringing back capitalism, as they find it to be more consistent with the really existent power dynamics in the country.
Literally most of the work people cite from Lenin is just him defending his own hypocrisy. It really says a lot that people will be all "dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't mean dictatorship" and then go on to cite Lenin glibly saying that civil war is good because it teaches the peasants how to shoot. It's simply not a well thought out framework for statecraft.
And all of this is summarized quite nicely in Animal Farm
The plot reads like a sunday school scare piece to warn children about the dangers of satanism. It's so vague and allegorical that you can't really critique it. The message is basically "if you revolt against the capitalists, a scary bad man will take over and hurt you." Also pretty disgusting that it portrays workers as farm animals and capitalists as humans. It's a very "American schools during the Cold War would make kids read that" kind of book.
It's not surprising that Orwell was a bigoted snitch who ratted leftists out to British intelligence, and was especially keen on turning in jews, black people, homosexuals, and anyone he deemed "anti-white."
https://bennorton.com/george-orwell-list-leftists-snitch-british-government/
I'll also throw in Asimov's review of 1984 while I'm ranting about this creep
http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
I kinda give side-eye to anyone really fond of the word statecraft. It's sort of an "I look up to a lot of neoliberal ghouls" shibboleth.
I liked Homage to Catalonia
Maybe if I read that it would temper my view of him, I mainly know him for writing an anti-Soviet book in the middle of a war with the nazis
Anyone who has actually studied political science has nothing but contempt for what Lenin did with his opportunity. At this point if you are ignoring all the hindsight of the 20th century, you are campist, not a communist. Which is what describes most of the lemmy communists.
This is a golden take. We seriously need to communicate it to the Left.
most on the left already agree