this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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GenZedong
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Right, learning is always good. The thing is, every fringe group, whether it's MAGA, anarchists, or ML or whatever, everyone wants you to read their docs.
And while I'm willing to check some stuff out, I've come to conclusions based on arm-chair reasoning such as "no government can ever be trusted", "humans are fallible, and putting some of them above others is inherently problematic regardless of the system". I'll read but am doubtful something will be able to convince me to trust in government or someone with power.
There's a difference from racist screeds and someone telling you to read the leaked diplomatic cables about tianenmen.
I know you said you're bowing out in another comment but I just want to say that states are bad, all states. States do bad things in pursuit of maintaining themselves. This is true of the capitalist state. This is true of the socialist state. What matters here is who they do their bad shit in service of, what class are they serving, the proletariat or the bourgeoisie.
We are communists. We want a stateless society. We want this because we know states are bad.
I think the only real difference in our views is the classic one. I simply don't see the dictatorship of the proletariat as not having the same tendencies toward corruption as every other. I can't imagine an organization powerful enough to defeat capitalism willfully giving up it's own power after it's job is done.
It will attract psychopaths like flies to shit like every other power structure.
I would strongly suggest reading State and Revolution to understand the reasoning on the function of the DotP. It is fundamentally oriented towards the tendencies of power and people following self-interested motivations in aggregate over time. No one is talking about "giving up" anything. The proletariat is to oppress the bourgeoisie by means of more genuinely democratic governance (that obstructs the power of capital that is exerted in liberal democracies) and erode the bourgeois class over time until it no longer exists. No power is surrendered at any point in that process, but the people who need to be oppressed are decided on class lines that cease to exist by the very same process as the class is oppressed.
You can find both text and audiobook versions online pretty easily, and hopefully the most famous work of the founder of the first Marxist state is not on the same level as QAnon manifestos to you.
Idk, sounds like a Q drop
Why?
It was a joke.
It's not about it giving up its power. It doesn't do that.
It redistributes resources to things that it needs. This is where understanding WHAT the state is and WHY it exists in the first place. The state exists as a tool of the ruling class to maintain their position of power and exploit the other classes. In a bourgeoise-state this is the bourgeoisie exploiting the other classes. In a proletarian state this is the proletariat exploiting the other classes. But once we abolish all classes and only have a single class the obvious outcome is that the resources dedicated to oppressing the other classes will be redistributed to new things. Much like the capitalist state winds down resource spending on cops and other shit when it doesn't require it, and ramps it up in a time of high class war. The proletarian-state will wind down the resources spent on oppressive organisations, prisons, cops, military, etc, because these all exist for a purpose - if that purpose is gone, people will use those resources for different things.
It's very longterm though. We're talking about something that will absolutely only happen when all capitalist states are gone and all socialist states enter a stage of unity. Once that's achieved military is going to be the first thing to disappear. Cops won't go until crime does and that's going to take achieving abundance first, as well as targeting more and more specific causes.
The marxist understanding of "the state" does not include systems of administration. Things like the decision bodies, councils etc are not "the state". It is expected that systems of administration will still exist under communism, councils of people deciding upon things and the like, this isn't exactly at odds with anarchist theory either though as anarchists don't exactly shun councils or deciding things between people.
We can be critical of past and existing socialist projects, but we can't ultimately forget that they must be supported and given grace in the face of the primary contradiction that is Global North imperialism. As long as our societies are influenced by class relations, states are going to exist for the foreseeable future. To think a socialist state shuld be abolished immediately in the context of being surrounded by imperialist predators is an irrational expectation..
Because of this, we are skeptical of the messaging coming from imperialist states. We support the countries that are attempting to progress humanity past capitalism, which is destroying us. For those of us in the imperial core, we understand that any criticisms we have of other socialist revolutions can't ultimately be trusted. Those criticisms -- whatever they may be -- have zero relevance to the nations that are battling for survival in spite of the empire we live in.
We should cautiously inspect the propaganda we consume from all states, socialist or not. But we omly continue to amass reasons to be downright cynical of anything coming out of Western governments.
Agreed! Criticism of the 20th century, both it's failures and it's successes, is vital to moving forward! We can't treat our past comrades as saints, nor ignore them, and they wouldn't want us to! Imagine knowing that those who came after you refused to learn from the mistakes you made! I can't imagine anything more horrible for someone who devoted their life to a scientific understanding of economy than people refusing to learn from observation.
Thx for your reply
IMO there's a false dichotomy here that nearly everyone I've talked to falls into, that there are only two ways to move into the future, the "tankie" way (is there a non-offensive word that means what "tankie" means and isn't specific to a tendency like "ML"?) and the anarchist way.
The tankie way is basically to unite the people, start a revolution to beat down capitalism, and form into a new authoritarian govt. but this time of the people. Somehow this new government is not going to become corrupted? And eventually no longer be needed and vanish?
The anarchist way is to unite the people, start a revolution to beat down capitalsm, and then... ???
I see fatal flaws in both of these paths that look obvious to me. To the tankies, a government not becoming corrupt? Talk about high fantasy. For the anarchists, what happens after? How to prevent warlords, or surviving capitalists from taking over again? It's an incomplete plan at best.
My personal position is that cultural progress must come first. To tankies, you can't force peace and harmony on hundreds of millions of people at once at the barrel of a gun. And to other anarchist, if you give millions of people who only know capitalism and exploitation sudden complete freedom as anarchist want would lead to chaos and destruction. Any attempts at revolution before the culture is ready for it will lead to protracted war, famine, etc.
So, why wait for a revolution to start building out of the ashes (which to be clear, a revolution of this scale would kill millions of people and cause massive permanent ecological damage, assuming a revolution like that could even happen in 2023 in the U.S., just the question of how to handle nuclear materials alone is daunting), we can work now to build the future from where we are now.
We can use any and all not-quite full on revolutionary tactics to weaken and destroy capitalism. (I'm not a pacifist btw, and not against all violence, I just think full-on revolution won't work)
--> We need to get people to start not looking to the government for solutions and start looking to their communities by providing superior solutions. If our communist way is better, let's demonstrate it.
Thanks for engaging but I still really don't think you've fully grasp what Marxism-Leninism is. You've continued to mischaracterize and create strawmen out of what M-L movements aspire to do (forcing peace at the barrel of a gun??).
Yes, historically, Marxism-Leninist revolutions have relied on centralized vanguard parties, but ultimately each country where a revolution takes place, socialism will be built according to that country's material conditions. There's no reason why our strategies and tactics can't adapt based on our particular situations, but we still take lessons from past attempts at building socialism. Marxism is not a dogma (although there are still those that treat it that way).
When we say a state is inevitible, it's the recognition that a state will naturally arise as long as there are still class relations. To not acknowledge that is to ignore material reality. After a revolution, there will still be a bourgeoisie and they will still be needed to contribute to building the socialist project. People will still have cultural tendencies from the prior bourgeois dictatorship. Money will still be a thing. Imperialism will still exist. How do you secure the ground the working class has won through revolution (which is still what you're talking about, whether you want to call it a "revolution" or not)? As long as the bourgeoisie exist, their interests will ultimately be opposed to the interests of the proletariat. How do you prevent a bourgeois dictatorship from seizing power again? You're going to need to repress them by some means. You're going to have to exclude them from decision-making bodies. What do you call that other than a state?
And class struggle doesn't just end when socialists seize power. It continues. And it's up to the masses to keep the new regime honest about it's ideals. Of course there is always the chance a socialist government can become overrun with corruption. That is the entire lesson we've learned from the violent dissolution of the USSR. But that doesn't mean we abandon the communist struggle. We learn, we recognize the internal and external forces at play, and we try to build on pre-existing theory so that we can better put it into practice.
Hey good on you for doing the reading and I hope the other people on our instance weren't too mean to you <3
But yeah, most of us started in the same place of being fucked over by capitalism or reactionaries in some way and searched for an alternative and ended up as communists.
personal story of how I became a communist, mention of bigoted alcoholic father
I myself had a pretty materially comfortable upbringing but my dad was and still is an incredibly right wing homophobic, transphobic and antisemitic alcoholic who literally volunteered for ukip, the Tories and the Brexit party at various different points. Like to give you an idea of the type of guy he is he got me a copy of 1984 when I was 8 and sat me down and lectured me on the evils of socialism (and also kind of said that it was simultaneously antisemitic while implying that it was also a Jewish conspiracy). Which kinda made growing up and realising I was queer but having to hide it quite polarising against his beliefs for me, so like i started discussing it online and searching like left wing queer friendly communities and like starting to gel with the idea of socialism (actually just kinda tentatively supporting Corbyn at that point - because like he seemed a bit too radical to me at the time for me to uncritically support)Anyway fast forward a year or two and I was calling myself a socialist or even a communist sometimes because I found the most acceptance in what were in retrospect, pretty milquetoast """socialist""" spaces and then I found hexbear and ngl it was so nice, like I didn't really agree with them about everything but from the very beginning the mods showed that they were extremely willing to go hard to protect the queer users of the site from queerphobic abuse and so I stuck around and they gradually got me to read theory and read up about history in my own time. Anyway, now 3 years since I joined hexbear I consider myself an ML because I see it as the most effective path forward for decolonisation and I very much admire the progressive history of (most) marxist-lenininist nations and also I pretty frequently end up discussing theory with the various trans communists from this site who are in my dms. Right now I'm sandwiched between reading 10 Days in Harlem by Simon Hall and Settlers: the Myth of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai
People are passionate about these topics, I get it. I wouldn't posted if I wasn't ready to take from a bunch of "tankies" lol. I had a good time, I'll be back arguing with y'all about something else soon :)
That being said, I started calling myself (anarcho-)communist when I realized the term for what I had essentially always felt.
Thx for the personal story!
Yeah, hope to see you soon. But yeah in general I'm a lot less, idk, gung ho with supporting China than most of the users of this site, but when its like come to major struggle sessions with outside users we kind of close ranks and keep to the hexbear line (excluding the hundred comment struggle session about kruschev that hexbear users had with each other in an unrelated worldnews thread on lemmy.ml when we first federated)
I think things will calm down after a week or so after all the hexbears get bored of arguing with libs and return to normal posting. after all the last time we had this many outsiders coming into our home turf and trying to start shit was like 3 years ago when some /pol/ users tried to raid hexbear and doxx some of the users and got bullied so hard they never came back
Anyway, hope you stay well <3