this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Communism
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hmm, I wonder who controls the socialist state
I am guessing that their response would be ‘the bureaucracy’ (which would be inaccurate).
It's partly because liberal westerners can see how shit their system is, see how shit their lives are or are becoming, see how much shit they have to take from unaccountable people, and then cannot fathom how people who they've been taught to see as subhuman could possibly achieve anything better. So a combination of racism and self-hatred. The only way out begins with self-reflection.
We only know the fucked up, one sided abusive relationship we have with our capitalist governments, so we can't imagine anything different.
🏅🏅🏅<--In lieu of hexbear medal emojis
😊
Not long after I wrote this, I poured a cup of tea and picked up Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism by Kwame Ture (a name he took later, leaving behind 'Stokely Carmichael'). He writes (p. 29–30, emphasis added):
It's as much analysis as you can expect from the userbase of Tumblr lite.
Let's be fair to them, at least they aren't reactionary. Still, unfunny "uwu" memes mixed with Lockheed Left behaviour does not paint a much more enjoyable scene.
Lockheed Left is reactionary though.
Yeah they're "left-wing"
The left wing of a lockheed martin plane
The one that can be used as a rudder when they go for the surprise amphibious landing?
The Lockheed left, one might say.
DA SEE SEE PEE
That’s another one. Leftoid nubs and self‐identified anticommunists usually see governing communist parties as highly élitist and exclusionary institutions (which is pretty dubious, to say the least).
Just because a state brands itself socialist doesn't say anything about the level of democracy or workers' control of it.
sure, but if we were talking about non-socialist states that call themselves socialist, we wouldn't call them socialist states
Well IMHO both USSR and China shows how gaining workers control and keeping it, or moreso making significant headway towards communism, is just much more complicated. Representative worker ownership of the means of production through the state doesn't have a compelling track record. I think it's dishonest, reactionary and anti intellectual to laugh off arguments like that of comrade spood from the screenshot above.
Edit: checked out my claim on calorie intake and discovered it was dubious. Removed, but letting the main argument stay.
The USSR was eventually compromised, so it technically failed in that sense, but how is China an example of failing to retain worker control? If you're claiming that capitalists control China's government, I'd challenge you to provide some evidence
Above, you seemed to suggest that you agree with the need for material analysis over idealism. You seem to be saying the same here, by saying what MLs already agree with: that state power in the USSR and China was/is complicated.
But then you say:
You responded to GrainEater about that, but I'll add here that revolutionary states run by Marxist Leninists are the only ones to have made any headway at all. The track record is at least 5-nil against all other revolutionary ideologies and that's only counting self-proclaimed ML AES states that still exist. These are Cuba, Vietnam, China, Laos, DPRK. A materialist analysis of these states may lead you to change your mind.
This isn't counting the massive, overwhelmingly positive contribution to humanity made by the USSR in it's short existence. Defeating Nazi Germany. Ending Feudalism in Russia and elsewhere. Supporting third world liberation movements and helping to 'end' colonialism. Raising the living standards of it's inhabitants. Providing an impetus for western social democracies to implement a welfare state (how fast these have deteriorated since the Berlin Wall fell!).
The problem with Spood's comment is that it doesn't really make sense. Do they mean the workers need to control the state that controls the means of production? If so, there's little or no disagreement.
Or that the workers need to control the means of production directly? If so, what does that mean? Does this mean worker co-ops? Or something else? If co-ops or something else, it's not Marxism. Plus, what happens to the logic of capital without a central authority, i.e. a state, to organise these units of workers? How do workers abolish the relations of capital (markets, competition, etc) if all they own is their own workplace? If they own more than the place they work, what structure are they using that isn't a state by another name?
If it is the latter (direct control), then it could instead mean simply that communism will only be achieved when the workers control the means of production. This is (1) a trite tautology with which no ML will disagree, and (2) either (a) only one side of the story or (b) anti-dialectical, and (3) not mutually exclusive with the workers controlling the means if production through the state.
As Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology, communism is the process of overturning capitalism.
From a dialectical perspective, which treats the world as interrelated contradictory processes rather than static things, a communist revelation must be a contradictory process. One can't claim to be an historical materialist and then refuse to treat revolution – the focus of all revolutionaries – in an anti-dialectical way. To reduce communism and revolution as a status that can pop into existence is to deny that these are, again, interrelated, contradictory processes.
Communism is not just the end goal or the 'end' end goal. Communism is the next stage of human social development, which will happen over a period of time. After that, humans will have to resolve other contradictions and society will develop further. Or not. Maybe humans are doomed to strive for communism forever. (Not my view.)
Either way, communism is both the name for the struggle and the goal that revolutionaries are struggling for. If this is what Spood means when they say that communists should never stop striving, every ML would likely agree.
If that's not what they mean, they seem to be making an empty left-communist slogan that means we either go straight to 23rd century communism in one fell swoop or don't bother trying.
Slogan-making like that is anti-intellectual for relying on models that don't account for the fact that reactionaries are armed to the teeth, violent, and merciless. Thus also dishonest by claiming knowledge that excludes salient facts. And reactionary for suggesting a path that will inevitably lead to failure and for criticising the revolutionaries who are actually doing revolution rather than waiting for a fairy godmother to wave the magic revolution wand.
In sum, it's idealist and anti-Marxist to reject the concept of and need for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
That's why Marxists reject idealism and rely only on material analyses.