Authority as indirect or direct force (essentially the engels) argument is the only logical way of definition authority, as the hexbear post argues using the example of the armed mugger. The definition of authority as blind obedience (as defined by the anarchist) is completely flawed in that it doesn’t account for the source of the blind obidelience and isn’t easy to measure.
This is the kind of analysis you get when you have no understanding how organizations work. Mao was not some lone actor who miraculously acquired supreme power, and then starved “half of China” for shits and giggles apparently.
Anyone familiar with the way that Mao operated knows that he made frequent use of the mass line and mass mobilisation. He also made use of the collective leadership of the party, and was often frustrated by their lack of cooperation with him (at one point even threatening to launch a revolution against the party). Even anti-communists who have at least studied China in detail know that the lone dictator nonsense is well, nonsense. It is just great man theory of history. A society is made of many moving parts.
As to the failures of the glf, they were entirely technical. The rush to industrialise in a decentralised manner left agricultural production vulnerable to poor weather conditions. This was compounded with the fact that much of the country at the time had poor transportation and communications, and ruled by corrupt cardie, leading to a disastrous lack of effective coordination across the nation. It is only with higher level organization today that countries can mount effective disaster responses. The glf proves the opposite of your point.
The laws or nature impose required forms of organization upon human society to function. The “double slavery” idea is not some obscure idea. When humans enslave nature to use it for their benefit, nature enslaved humans and imposes specific forms of organisation in turn. The specific form of organization imposed upon a society of large scale industrial producers is large scale centralized organization, in which the will of singular individuals is drowned out.
You are wrong on the factual level.
The role of money in soviet society was always subordinate to material production. Money was necessary only due to the technical limitations of planning a vast economy without sufficient computing power. The sphere of commodity exchange was supressed as much as possible. Much of the soviet citizen’s consumption was either heavily subsidised or free. This went all the way from food, transportation to even fancy entertainment (like spas and theatres). In fact, the heavy distortion of prices in soviet society is often cited as a reason for its eventual collapse.
Therefore, calling the soviet union state capitalist is absurd. Capitalism requires a dominant bourgeois class, the operation of the law of value and the anarchy of production. None of these elements were present in the soviet union.
Going by the other comments, his sin appears to be having a Russian passport
What even do you mean “a way of removing a putin” if what I have said does not suffice?
As far as my understanding of the soviet style democratic centralist systems goes (I suppose DemCent could be implemented in many ways, just like liberal electoralism can), every country has a supreme soviet which convenes some times a year to appoint, remove and review the progress of the presidium. The members of the presidium themselves have a strong distribution of powers amongst each other, and so a dictator type like Putin shouldn’t really show up at all, and if he does, he should be removed by the supreme soviet. The supreme soviet itself was elected by lower level regional soviets, which were in turn elected by lower level soviets and so on until you had the fully local soviets, which were initially organizations the factory workers and soldiers during the revolution (so they predated even the USSR), and latter (after the 1936 constitution) became location based (so similar to the local councils in liberal systems).
I have heard compelling arguments that any new DemCent system should take ideas from ancient athenian democracy like sortition and direct democracy. I agree with them, but implementing such a system in reality would likely be challenging and require many preconditions to be met (such as having a highly educated population with good amounts of free time and no worries about war or imperialism).
Aren’t people on ML instances also doing the exact same thing when they shout down and decry the wretched “liberals” (which seems to refer to anyone left-of-centre who doesn’t support communist party rule)?
Liberal is a well defined category though. Liberalism as a self-described ideology opposed to both communism and monarchy has been around for centuries at this point. Most people being decried as liberals would themselves identify as liberals.
Got captured by anti-communists, who then proceeded to march tanks through moscow to bomb the supreme soviet (ironic, right?) and dissolved the union, strip all of its capital assets leading to one of the largest peacetime drop in living standards in human history.
Congratulations, your ideology cannot be implemented in the real world because the ruling class interests will do anything in their power to stop anything like it from ever being implemented and you reject the use of force to displace these said ruling class interests, who are currently boiling the plane alive killing millions of people through pollution, healthcare neglect, war and disease.
Capitalists societies have only ever implemented mixed economies with (relatively) low gini coefficients in the aftermath of WW2, when both the working class was armed (and willing to use force) and there existed an existential threat in the form of the soviet union. Outside of these conditions, capitalists societies have maintained extremely irrational forms of organization.
It is not sufficient to have some idea of what kind of society you want, you also need to think about the kinds of conditions under which said society could actually exist irl.
Our definition of what is and isn’t a democracy is significantly different than that of liberals. We wouldn’t consider Europe and America to be democracies meaning that we have no sympathies for those style of governments and societies.
To contextualize this, one thing you have to understand is that there are many formulations of democracy that have existed historically. Athenian democracy is very different from liberal democracy, which is in turn very different from democratic centralism (the formulation most used by Marxist states). And there were probably many forms of democracy that hunter-gatherers and indigenous peoples used (which I unfortunately don’t know much about).
The main problems with how democracy is talked about in liberal philosophy (the hegemonic philosophy) is that only the liberal formulation of democracy is considered valid, even if its performance has historically been extremely subpar. Furthermore, class is completely ignored, as all “democracies” have existed in service of a class (in athens, for the slave owners, in liberal republics, for the bourgeoise, in ML republics, for the proles).
Because we do not consider liberal democracies to be a valid form of democracy, liberals take this disingenuously as if Marxists hate all democracy.
It gets very tiring trying to have a conversation with contrarians who think everything Western is bad and anything Chinese/USSR is good.
Why do outsiders keep making shit up about lemmygrad and hexbear?
Or worse, that their highly suspicious news sources (some random blog usually) are telling you the real truth, while using any mainstream news media source makes you a deluded Lib
I use this instance regularly and more often than not, the articles posted on the news coms are from mainstream sites. And even the “random blogs” (not really, it’s a few relatively well known blogs) use mainstream news to get basic facts. As proof, !worldnews@lemmygrad.ml is a link to the world news com. Out of the 20 articles on the front page (as of writing this comment), 9 are from the typical mainstream sites (like reuters) and 5 are from sites that may be mainstream, but I don’t know them. Only 6 are from sources like FT or things like a youtube video (which again, may be from some mainstream author).
Yes
Love how all of the tankies on this thread are open about their views while all of the non-tankies are wondering what the term even means, or think that people won’t self identify as a tankie. Reminds of that quote from the manifesto
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
:( I don’t get it
Humans can be made began if say, meat production was banned. How far we are willing to go to save ourselves from ecological disaster is a matter of choice
vegan cultists
Brainworms
What the fuck are you talking about? Countries with low birth rates and high incomes are the ones eating giga tons of meat
Why aren’t people complaining about russia genociding their soliders?
Barely down the comments section and I already see Russia lmao.
This is like being a friend of someone who’s experiencing an abusive relationship, and instead of telling them directly, you removed at their abusive partner directly, expecting that to make them treat your friend better? Somehow?
The fuck else do think everyone hating on and protesting in college campuses and against Biden is doing? Also, he is not my friend or your friend. And he is in no abusive relationship. This is 2 serial killers hanging out and giving each other assistance. You can’t kill either one as they are well protected, but you can slash their tires.
also linguistically, you literally cannot classify a war as a genocide. That’s not fucking possible, this is like classifying a car as a boat. A war can include genocide, as demonstrated ever so lovingly by the germans during that one world war. They are two distinct parts of a collective whole here.
Ah metaphysics, my old friend. War is not a static, isotropic constant that remains unchanged throughout the universe like a water molecule or the speed of light. The nature of the war itself fundamentally changes depending on the millions of factors that give it context, amongst them, genocide being a big one.
A liberal is someone who:
Anyone from the left complaining about liberals is using this definition of liberals (typically). The basic reasoning for using this definition if liberal is that it has always been the definition of liberal and has only changed recently in some parts of the world. It is also not necessary to change the definition because the “progressive liberals” also mostly fit the old definition either way. Pretty much every serious socialist political theory will start with a criticism of the philosophy of liberalism.
Being against “anti-authoritarians” is not the same thing as being “authoritarian” as these categories are not useful in the first place. No marxist considers themselves to be either category.