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My roommate has dubbed himself a "libertarian communist" (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 21 hours ago

For number 2, this is just true about specialization in a society, and has been forever. I don't think the hvac guy thinks I'm stupid for not knowing how to fix my own ac unut, I think we both recognize that some situations call for specialized skills and knowledge. If someone dedicates time and effort to studying something and I don't, I'm going to let them take the lead when that thing becomes relevant, and lend my assistance however I can, because the baseline assumption is that we're a society, a team. So many American truisms about "human nature" are actually just expressions of our own bourgeois government that eats and drinks abuse and deception.

Your roommate might have the same lingering brainworms I did at the beginning of my socialist education, where I've been conditioned to always just waiting for the rug pull and literally could not believe that there wasn't one coming. The tired old "revolution betrayed" cliche.