My roommate has been educating himself on communism, and we have been having many great conversations on theory and what have you. He says he is a communist. However, he has come to some very different conclusions to me, and I have been going back and forth on his talking points a lot. I was wondering what you guys would think of his talking points since I have to hear them and discuss them with him a lot.
-
Vanguardism/council republics are inherently flawed and undemocratic. He admits that there is democracy within a Marxist-Leninist government, but says it is not good enough because you don’t vote directly for the president, etc…
-
Says that vanguardism is “elitist” and that the core of the idea is that the working classes are stupid and only the intelligentsia knows right. He said he liked Lenin but he was too “mean” and didn’t speak as kindly of the peasants as he wanted. (lol)
-
Attributes the fall of the USSR entirely to the democratic organization of the government. Says that if the Soviet Union had allowed a more “libertarian” “democratic” structure what happened wouldn’t have happened. I’ve also notice he attributes a lot of China’s problems historically to the way their government is structured.
This is the stage where he needs to read an in-depth study of any revolution. His theory has to be tested against the challenges real-world revolutionaries faced.
Imo the Russian revolution is the best one to study but it’s more important that the source is good. Losurdo’s Stalin is a good read. Proles Pod is in the process of a multi part series as well.
Rather than try to directly refute years of ingrained propaganda, start the process of building a better foundational understanding. The misinfo will be slowly abandoned when it starts to contradict his more complex network of knowledge.
I wish I knew how to tell bro he’s an idealist and has brain worms in real life person language. He says revolutionary governments should work to oppress the bourgeoisie, but if the vanguard party isn’t abolished/dissolved/weakened within a certain amount of time its “authoritarian”. I keep trying to address external pressures on these entities and what I feel like is a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept by him, but it’s to no avail.
Ultimately it’s not a matter of him coming to the “right” conclusion, it’s whether he can answer the questions posed by material conditions. So rather than saying his conclusions are wrong, describe some of the problems the USSR faced and ask how he would have dealt with them. Both of the sources I mentioned go through this in detail, I strongly recommend them to everyone.
This doesn’t work because all of your revolutions also failed. The USSR fell. The CCP liberalized.
Regardless of your opinion on the outcomes, I don’t understand how studying these revolutions “doesn’t work”. Should we dismiss the French revolution with no investigation?
Both the Russian and Chinese revolutions succeeded in seizing the state, defeating the armies of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, and surviving their attempts at sabotage and terrorism. How did they do so? What can we learn from these decisions? What might we have to do differently with our different circumstances?
If you think the revolutions failed, what caused them to fail, and what specifically should the parties have done differently? And we need concrete answers to the real problems they were trying to solve, not idealist hand waving.
The communist revolution in China did not “fail” and the nation has not become less socialist due to its reforms; you are blinded by aesthetics and you do not understand Marxism. Opening up the economy was a move by the CPC that reflected a proper understanding of the subjective nature of socialist construction and corrected Mao’s systematic fatalism/mechanism.
Yeah I went through that phase.
I grew past it when I accepted that direct democracy and consensus decision making and leaderless horizonalism can’t work while under siege by capitalist reaction and counter-revolution. That kind of structure might work in peace, not class war.
I came to that conclusion from watching and experiencing the failure of the 2010s protest movements - you can’t fight a revolution if everyone is debating everything all the time and there’s no leaders. There’s a good historical retrospective about this called If We Burn, highly recommend. The most important conclusion from the book was, if you don’t pick your leaders democratically, they will pick themselves.
That phase is called idealism and comes from a lack of any sort of analysis. It is an entirely contrived, utopian solution “to which reality will have to adjust itself.”
There is no ideal Marxist form of democracy other than the form which suits the conditions at hand.
This is a pretty normal route of radicalization. Libertarian socialism definitely jives more with the propaganda that Americans grew up with. My path was libertarian -> Bernie lib / socdem -> anarchist -> Marxist / ml. What got me was basically reading about the success rates of anarchism vs MLism, honestly I still feel like anarchism/libsoc aligns with my ideals more than MLism. But unfortunately it just can’t really defend itself like ML revolutions can
honestly I still feel like anarchism/libsoc aligns with my ideals more than MLism. But unfortunately it just can’t really defend itself like ML revolutions can
I vibe with this. I don’t think the planet has time for us to wait to get it right first try and achieve anarcho-communism before we achieve more hierarchical forms.
Not voting directly for the head of state is pretty normal even in first world capitalist countries.
Is it more democratic to have a rotating cast of circus clowns, each blaming their predecessor for the current problems and passing the buck to the next while shuffling off before there’s even a semblance of accountability for their actions?
Who comprises the vanguard? Bro’s talking about Narodnism, not vanguardism but he doesn’t even know it.
#3 is pure, uncut idealism. Zubok’s book Collapse details the causes of the systematic and intentional dismantling of the USSR (Audiobook here). There’s no reason why people couldn’t have been sold this incremental undermining of the USSR through referenda and other democratic processes.
