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No true Scotsman, capitalist edition (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/socialism@lemmy.ml
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[–] -5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

My version is: people calling themselves communists, but then extolling all the great things that a state can do by calling top-down social control "consensus" of the proletariat, and who clearly don't actually want to engage with the 'commune' part of communism.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Communism is not communalism. At least if we are talking about Marxist understandings. Top-down administration is not incompatible with bottom-up consensus building, and both are necessary in a fully collectivized system across the entire world.

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  • [+] -6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    Communism is not communalism, but it is heavily based on the Commune as a structure (I mean, Marx was literally drawing on the Paris Commune in formulating it) and means of governing by consensus of the proletariat.

    Too many communists make a "survival of the fittest"-like mistake when trying to understand DoTP as Marx intended it, which was a descriptive state where the actions of the Proletariat as a body signify their collective will, and only conceptualize it as Lenin bastardized it, which was as a prescriptive mandate for authority by the State.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    The Paris Commune, in Marx's analysis, was both progressive and yet a failure for not smashing the former state apparatus and failing to establish proletarian state power. The idea of having a bunch of horizontalist, indepentent but interconnected cells is not a Marxist notion, but instead closer to anarchism. Lenin did not bastardize the DotP, he clarified Marx's intentions against the bastardization by the second international.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    Marx never intended there to be a vanguard party, and Engels literally said, "Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat". The universal suffrage that Marx explicitly did credit to the Commune, that made the Commune closest to real statelessness and classlessness, was totally abolished by Lenin (I think he actually called it "bourgeoise fetishism" in one critique).

    Marx also never defined DotP in terms of violence, it was purely about class rule by the proletariat over the bourgeoise, as where Lenin explicitly defined it as requiring violent suppression of the bourgeoise by the proletariat. Marx always left open peaceful transitions to socialist rule, whereas Lenin explicitly ruled that out, and their definitions of DotP are at their core unaligned because of that. DotP was, to Marx, what happened as the state began to dissolve towards actual stateless Communism. To Lenin, it was (as I said before) a mandate to state power for the party (insert "stop resisting, you're being liberated" meme).

    Whether you think Lenin was justified given his circumstances, a minority class of 'party-conscious' executives "leading" the proletariat while also suppressing and later banning rival socialist parties and party factions, is absolutely not what Marx intended DotP to look like.

    Lenin also asserted the inability of the proletariat to form class consciousness in ways that, to me as a non-Leninist look like a validation of Trotsky's early criticisms (and obviously Trotsky was right in the end about 'substitutionism', and about Stalin). Lenin couldn't openly disparage proletariat rule for obvious reasons, but he did attempt to draw heavy distinctions between the proletariat and revolutionary leaders themselves, such as asserting that the proletariat would only achieve "trade-union consciousness" without the party (leaders) there to essentially save them from themselves.

    It's funny you explicitly contrast Marxism against anarchism, because that feels like the colloquial meaning of anarchism? Otherwise, you're essentially ruling out the eventual dissolution of State and Class, which is a form of anarchism.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Marx was a member of what can be understood as a vanguard party, the International Working Men's Association. Marx was not against vanguard parties. The Paris Commune was a dictatorship of the proletariat, but you're fixating on the key problems with it that prevented it from being a successful dictatorship of the proletariat, which the Bolsheviks succeeded in establishing.

    Lenin's point on how, without forming broad working class organizations, sponteniety will at most result in the Trade Union consciousness, is correct. It isn't that the proletariat could not form class consciousness in general, but that without an all-encompassing organization, these will always be limited to the extent that the proletariat is confined to local struggle. Having the most politically advanced among the proletariat organize in a political party is the same as how Marx engaged in political practice.

    Lenin did not draw a distinction between the proletariat and the political party. Lenin did the opposite, stating that the party is of the proletariat. "Intellectuals" are not a class, they are a subsection of every class, and in organizing in a political party they serve as proletarian "intellectuals." I'm using air quotes because the term "intellectual" is a social role, not a measure of intelligence, you can be a very stupid intellectual or a very smart non-intellectual.

    As for Trotsky/Stalin, this is wrong. Trotsky became a traitor, and was wrong about distrusting the peasantry. Stalin was more correct than Trotsky, and though I would charitably say that their big schism was an avoidable tragedy, Stalin was the one in the right on that fight. That's why he was elected, and supported by the people.

    As for Marxism vs. Anarchism, the final end result of each is entirely different. Marxism posits full collectivization across the entire global economy, which represents a true end to class distinctions globally. Anarchism instead goes for full horizontalism, which results in petty bourgeois worker-cooperative style cells. Marxism and Anarchism understand class and the state differently, so what is stateless and classless for a Marxist has a state and class for anarchists, and vice versa.

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  • [+] -3 points 1 month ago (2 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    Nah, there's no revisionism in my comment.

    The reason I said the International Working Men's Association could be considered a vanguard is because the term was not commonly used at the time, but it de facto was an attempt at building a vanguard party. They created a working class party that attempted to organize the working classes and raise political consciousness among the rest of the proletariat.

    Secondly, the idea that the Paris Commune was successful is horribly wrong, it lasted a very short amount of time and did not solidify itself. It was a valiant first attempt, but it had serious faults, faults Marx and Engels grappled with for the rest of their lives, analyzing what went wrong.

    Third, there is no such thing as a "political class." This is revisionism. The state is not outside of class struggle, it is within and a product of class struggle. The state serves the ruling class of society. Class is a relation to ownership of the means of production. A teacher is not a different class from a principal, even if the principal manages teachers.

    Lenin did not "exploit" Marx's writings, he correctly advanced Marxism forward and successfully solidified the first long-standing Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Anyone trying to revise Marxism to create brand-new classes in order to dismiss Lenin is doing a disservice not just to Lenin, not just to Marx, but to the hundreds of millions of Soviet communists that successfully built socialism.

    As for Stalin, you didn't really say anything of substance regarding why you think he was wrong. You just repeated Red Scare nonsense and subjectivist appeals to a vague "Stalinist terror," ignoring that the Bolshevik line on the peasantry supported them and focused on their development through the Tax in Kind before even the proletariat. The Menshevik line dismissed the peasantry outright.

    As for your point on collectivizing and ending class systems, we already said the same thing. The problem is that you invent brand-new concepts for classes and revise Marxism from dialectical materialism to subjectivism and metaphysics. Classes have dialectical counterparts, and their existence is based on ownership of the means of production. A democratic and socialist state like the USSR that is run by the proletariat is in fact a dictatorship of the proletariat, not a dictatorship of the "political class." Administrators are sub-classes that fall under a given ruling class, and their role depends on how they relate to ownership of the means of production.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    Calling my comment where I'm arguing for Marxism "anti-Socialist" is hilarious. Guess only the one form of Socialism that the mod likes is real Socialism, huh?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    You're arguing against Marxism, though. Revising Marxism and then accusing others who hold a more classically Marxist understanding (in this case Marxist-Leninist) is still arguing against the classical bits of Marxism you've revised.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    I was heading to reply to your comment when I discovered my previous one has been deleted. Didn't seem worth continuing to debate the topic if mod tools would be used to excise the bits of my arguments that you didn't like.

    I certainly haven't revised Marxism any more than Lenin did by your own argument (since advancements are literally revisions anyways).

    "Political class" was me attempting to avoid getting into what I assumed would be an unproductive debate about how the politburo and other central committee members were clearly not of the working class based on their power and lifestyles; I was not asserting it as an actual part of Marxist class hierarchy.

    And using "we're collectivist not horizontalist" is a great euphemism for saying "we'll recreate the vertical structures of class stratification, but claim the collective Will as we do so".

    Look, I think you and I probably agree at the root about Communism vs Capitalism. I think where we diverge is that I don't think Marxism needs to be "advanced" to function within the confines of a State-dominated Capitalist world and operate as peer-states, which is what Lenin was trying to do.

    I think the beauty of Marxism (as well as many other forms of Socialism, including ones Marx considered Utopian) is partially that it rejects the instinct to play using the rules and language that Capitalists and Statists use to order the world (and the language absolutely controls the mental and therefore social models).

    If you start trying to alter it so that you can just have a peer-state operating under a Socialist model of labor organization, you're still going to fall prey to the inherent re-structuring that States as structures naturally undergo due to how inter-national power works.

    Why did the USSR collapse? I think you and I both agree it's not due to it failing on it's own, nor due to it being somehow destroyed by the US and their cronies (though they certainly did everything they could to harm it, they couldn't ever destroy it without military action, which is capitalism's go-to method of "competition"). In my view, it's because its Statist governing* model was intrinsically incompatible with its Socialist social and labor model in the long run.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    When Marxists say "revisionism," we do not simply mean "expansion" or "extension," but instead changing the pillars of Marxism. This isn't inherently wrong, Marx could be disproven and therefore revising his theories would be correct. However, what Lenin did was carry Marxism to the era of imperialism. He did not challenge or change the pillars of Marxism. By revising class into something that includes administrative differences, and isn't related to ownership of the means of production and distribution, you are attacking the foundations of Marxism itself.

    The Politburo and various administrative positions were in fact proletarian. They received wages for their work, and did not gain through ownership of capital. They occupied high positions in the state, but this is not a class. All of your criticism of Marx (and you say it's criticism of Lenin, but this was not something invented by him but instead by Marx) rides its way back here. When I assert that you change Marx into an anarchist, I mean you are replacing Marxist class theory with anarchist power theory. This does not actually follow from dialectical materialism or the materialist conception of history.

    The USSR's dissolution was complex. A number of factors contributed to it, but part of it was the Khrushchevite reforms that added competition within the state apparatus, Gorbachev's incompetent growth of problems laid under Khrushchev, and finally the Yeltsin coup. World War II killed the majority of competent, trained, dedicated communists, which hollowed out the party apparatus and left it vulnerable to careerist opportunists. The fact that it was a socialist state was of no consequence to socialist construction, it was in fact the weakening of the state that led to a counter-revolt.

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