Afaik this happened with every single instance of a communist country. Communism seems like a pretty good idea on the surface, but then why does it always become autocratic?
Afaik this happened with every single instance of a communist country. Communism seems like a pretty good idea on the surface, but then why does it always become autocratic?
I never said he was an anarchist, and I never said he claimed it should or could be done in a single stroke.
Scientific Socialism requires one to learn from the past, and adapt as needed. It doesn’t mean a dogmatic prescription of “how”.
Then I fail to see how you can make this claim:
The withering away of the Proletarian State is not on the basis of “giving” anything “up.” The basis is on the State folding everything into the Public Sector, at which point laws like Private Property Rights disappear alongside it. When the government has folded all property into the Public Sector, the State itself ceases to exist, there’s nobody to “give up” and nobody to “give up” to. There is just the people, as they make up the “administration of things.”
“Started down the track” is how I make that claim. He went from very staunchly “Seize the state, and use it to implement communism!” to “Well, thats not such a hot idea… we need to re-work that”.
You know, the “scientific” part of “Scientific Socialism”.
Simply because he shifted his position against the usage of the Bourgeois State into using a Proletarian State does not mean if he lived to today he would have gone any further than that. We must learn and adapt, yes, but not do so blindly. Ultraleftism out of dogma is flawed thinking that leads to incorrect conclusions, and I see no reason to believe he “started down the track” at all. Rather, he reframed, and this new frame has no theoretical basis for being a road at all unless you can make the case that central planning and public ownership of underdeveloped sectors of the economy is reasonable unilaterally.
There is no rational argument to say this. In fact, lessons borne out of past revolutionary experiments have shown us this is the route that leads to failure. Centralization of control, into the hands of the few, never leads to liberation of the working class.
That was a lesson he was learning, as well, and it was in its infancy at the time. We’ve had many more examples to learn from, and don’t need to try it again.
Lessons bourne out of past revolutionary experience prove Marxism does work, but like all real systems, face real struggles. The answer is not to abandon it entirely and adopt Anarchism, which has not had real practical experience to draw from, but to learn from what has and has not worked in AES States. Centralization is the basis for true democracy, as without it the power of each individual aspect of society is governed by their locality. In an ever-interlocking world, the local cannot take priority over the whole. That does not mean all power should come from above, but rather that through centralization democracy can be better utilized from below and above.
To make the claim that AES is “centralization in the hands of the few” and that it “never leads to the liberation of the working class” is dogmatic thinking based on a false premise and false conclusion to said premise, and you haven’t justified any of it. Such subjectivism does not constitute objective, rational reasoning, and as such fails to truly learn from the results of past and present Socialism.
Yes, Marxism works. Leninism (And it’s offshoots) do not.
Marxism-Leninism is the only Marxism that has been put in practice, moreover Marxism-Leninism is not a departure from Marxism. I don’t know how you say “Marxism works” and reconcile that with “Marxism-Leninism does not” within the same breath. What are you trying to say here? Where do Marx and Lenin disagree? How does Marxism work and Marxism-Leninism not?
That is wholly incorrect.
Neozapatismo is also type Marxism, and is not Marxist-Leninist. They are a non-white manner of organizing a communist society. (They will claim they are “None of the above”, rightfully so, however, analysis will show it’s a Marxist-based ideology and system, with some Anarchist ideology too).
Leninism is in fact, a departure from Marxism, as it fully drops the “scientific” part of the entire ideology. In fact, Leninism, arguably, isn’t even socialist, since it merely gives us new oligarchs in lieu of the old oligarchs.
It could have been an experiment in Marxism, and I’d say it was an experiment in Marxism. However, it is certainly a failed experiment. The Neozapatistas have persisted for 30 years now, for example, and are so far doing much better than the Soviet Union did as a liberatory movement. Same with Maoism, which started off good, but made the same mistakes the Soviets did, and now we just have another capitalist state.