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.
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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…
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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)
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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.
Sounds like a lot of the same lib brainworms I had as a baby communist. Annoying as hell, but there’s a real possibility to fully tip them to the based side if you follow Sankara’s advice and never tire of explaining.
took me some time to realize all encompassing, radical direct democracy is not the solution to states under siege from every attack vector in existence
in isolation this kind of direct democracy would likely not have “saved” the Soviet Union. would more democratic accountability have helped? possibly, i’m not educated enough to say
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for it. i believe libertarian socialism/communism/marxism is a transition state that we should absolutely strive for in the post, final-conflict era.
once socialism is dominant and capitalism is on the ropes it would be criminal not to work towards it on the way to advanced socialism and full communism
liberation should be in totality
I would argue that libertarian communism is the end goal. We want to eliminate the state in the long run, after all. But the worker’s state and the vanguard party are materially necessary in the (very literal) revolutionary war against capitalism
Regarding points one and two, he should read some Mao regarding the vanguard and it’s role. The vanguard is not separate from the proletariat, it is the most politically advanced section of it. It is only formed through mass struggle and exists only in a dialectical relationship with the masses.
However active the leading group may be, its activity will amount to fruitless effort by a handful of people unless combined with the activity of the masses. On the other hand, if the masses alone are active without a strong leading group to organize their activity properly, such activity cannot be sustained for long, or carried forward in the right direction, or raised to a high level. The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate and the relatively backward. The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate element and to win over the backward elements. A leading group that is genuinely united and linked with the masses can be formed only gradually in the process of mass struggle, and not in isolation from it.
In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily “from the masses, to the masses”. This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge.
