Can anyone succinctly explain communism? Everything I’ve read in the past said that the state owns the means of production and in practice (in real life) that seems to be the reality. However I encountered a random idiot on the Internet that claimed in communism, there is no state and it is a stateless society. I immediately rejected this idea because it was counter to what I knew about communism irl. In searching using these keywords, I came across the ideas that in communism, it does strive to be a stateless society. So which one is it? If it’s supposed to be a stateless society, why are all real-life forms of communism authoritarian in nature?
Material conditions made me put the worker council leaders in front of a firing squad!
If you want to discuss the history of the Russian revolution, I saved but didn’t post several paragraphs, but deleted them for the sake of brevity. Flattening the whole 100 years of Russian “socialist” history to highlight it’s worst abuses is just as intellectually lazy as flattening it to only highlight the best parts of it. I’m not going to apologise for Kronstadt or anything that came after, but the civil war period was horrible. And had the Bolsheviks not taken power, Kornilov or Kerensky would have, and instituted far more brutal oppression; if not just tried to restore the Tzar.
The organizing principles of the Bolsheviks and RSDLP should absolutely be studied leading up to Oct 1917, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, and Anton Pannekoek’s criticisms of Lenin.
But saying “firing squad” doesnt prove that communism leads to authoritarianism, although it references a time in history that was very brutal and oppressive. However, Its not as good of a criticism as you are capable of. I’m used to having discussions with people who probably aren’t critical enough of the Bolsheviks, so its refreshing to hear from you, in a way.
No one said this.
Saying that the rise of authoritarianism had nothing to do with ideology is wrong though. Mind you, it wasn’t the result of communist ideology, but the opportunistic Leninist ideology that hijacked the worldwide leftist movement.
I disagree, but I appreciate you walking back the anticommunism. Paul LeBlanc covers about every argument for Lenin’s “opportunism” in great detail, I would recommend Lenin and the Revolutionary Party for a good description of Leninism before 1921. If you mean Leninism like “Foundations of Leninism” then yeah I’ll join you in calling Stalin an opportunist. But not even Paul Averich, anarchist critic of the Bolsheviks and historian, was willing to lay the authoritarianism of the USSR at the feet of Lenin. But I don’t want to legislate the tragedies of 20th century socialism. I’ll study it, but there’s plenty of reasons to be skeptical.
I recently read a couple books by Cyril Smith who is pretty negative toward Lenin, and while I don’t really buy his premise, I think his emphasis on what was missing (an analysis on “sensuous human activity,” like in Theses on Feuerbach) from the Plekhanov-Leninist tendency of Marxism holds water.