- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Cross-posted from “TRUE communism!” by @[email protected] in [email protected]
Cross-posted from “TRUE communism!” by @[email protected] in [email protected]
I understand that this is an anarchist comm, so you’re free to post whatever you want, but I don’t think it’s productive to take a stance that fundamentally rests on misrepresenting what you’re critiquing. Since you invoked my username in one of your comments here, I’d figure I’d give the Marxist stance its fair representation.
First, there is no such thing as “true communism.” The obsession over purity in politics is a result of dogmatism and book workship.
Secondly, for Marxists, the stance isn’t that you “do a state” and then “stop doing the state.” For Marxists, not just Marxist-Leninists, the state is purely a body that resolves class contradictions through class oppression. It isn’t hierarchy, and it isn’t organization. Communism in the marxist conception, as a stateless society, is stateless in that once all property is collectively owned and planned, there is no class distinction. Administration remains, and is not to whither, as that’s a necessary product of mass, industrialized production.
Taking that into account, the state can only disappear if all class disappears, and class cannot be abolished until all global production is collectivized. There has never been that point, you cannot have communism in one country. You can be socialist, in that public property can be the principle aspect of the economy and the state can be proletarian in character, but the state can never whither until all states are socialist, interconnected, and borders fading away into one democratic system.
Socialist countries like the PRC do rely on commodity production to engage with the global economy, as they must for the time being. They can’t achieve a global system as one single country. As long as the state holds control of the large firms and key industries, and resolves class contradictions in the favor of the proletariat and against the bourgeoisie, then as the economy develops and grows it will continue to take on an increasingly socialized character. You cannot “declare socialized production” with the stroke of a pen, it’s something that must arise from development. That doesn’t mean the character of an economy that is dominated by public ownership is capitalist, either, just that it is on the “socialist road,” ie it is socialist, and working its way to higher levels of socialization until communism is achieved.
This is all starkly different from the anarchist position, that we can develop from the outset a decentralized, horizontalist society. I’m not going to debatelord here, this is an anarchist comm, but if you’re going to misrepresent the views of Marxists, then I feel you’re doing a disservice by making anarchists less prepared to engage in productive conversation with Marxists.
This is the crux of the disagreement between anarchists and MLs. I would argue that state ownership - if the state does not adequately represent the will of the people - is not public ownership. A hierarchical state with a flawed and bureaucratic democracy that is prone to corruption inevitably creates and maintains a class of bureaucrats with social, political, and economic privilege. The state - in order to preserve itself - maintains a monopoly on collective ownership, preventing workers from organizing on their own terms.
This is what anarchists mean when they call something “state capitalist.” They are arguing that the state itself is a private entity pretending to represent the will of the people.
I’d say the real crux of the argument is in full centralization and collectivization, or full horizontalism and decentralization. The endpoints are different, so the means are different.
Either way, I don’t agree that administrators represent a class. Public property is not bourgeois property, it doesn’t exist in the M-C-M’ circuit of production, it’s collective and planned. Even if there’s administration, it’s a physical, real thing. There will be flaws, there will be issues, but to let perfect be the enemy of progress is an issue. It’s less about some metaphysical “will of the workers” and more about material relationships to the means of production and the sublimation of property.
Secondly, the state doesn’t “preserve itself,” at least the Marxist conception of the state. The state isn’t a class, it’s a representative of a class, and when all property has been sublimated, there is no class, and no state. There still exists administration, but not special bodies of armed men to oppress other classes, as there are no classes to oppress.
It feels a bit disingenuous to hear the following:
I mean I got your point the other day, that I shouldn’t necessarrily argue about Communistic dogma without reading all the literature, but I had to fight tooth and nail to get to that point and not just be waved away as a bad faith actor. So I was already working hard just to be told to go and read up.
OP is using the same intensity hammer you guys got going on over there. Is it fair?
I don’t remember having this convo with you, so I don’t have any reference for that convo. OP is misrepresenting the Marxist stance. It’s one thing to critique the genuine positions Marxists have, it’s another entirely to invent a strawman to argue against. The intensity of the argument isn’t the problem, the illegitimacy of the argument is.
I don’t think it was with you specifically, more hexbear in general? https://lemmy.ml/post/28545991
Oh, good catch!
I sure do love being treated like I’m a part of a hivemind, and that everyone on Hexbear is interchangeable with no individual characteristics… 🫠 /s
Seriously though, I thought that was an odd statement, but that makes sense.
Yup, that was me. Sorry for mixing you up. I guess you spoke to me like a human there first, that’s why your name stuck.
I feel it still doesn’t take away too much from my argument. While OP’s post is outright malicious and is meant to start a fight, I wasn’t doing that on what I thought was a proper place for discussion.
Again, I don’t want to jump to conclusions, and I did make a mistake, but don’t you see what I’m trying to get at?
Personally, I try my best to adhere to the principle of “no investigation, no right to speak.” I’m not perfect at that, but I do my best. Someone who has a strong stance on a subject without doing the due dilligence to justify that strong stance muddies the water. I believe you were guilty of it over in that thread, and I believe OP is guilty of it here. Does that make sense?
Goodness, does it ever.
But my problem was that the group put me in a box. Nobody wanted to know my level of education, just if I read this or that book on communism.
It is a totally fair reason not to engage in argument. It’s just… How can I put it…? Just because I didn’t read a book, I can’t be knowledgable on a subject?
My guesses are that your community is so exposed to bad faith arguments, so you cannot give everyone the time of day. I haven’t gone back to reread the thread, but you can probably see how I was basically backing into a corner through the whole thread.
It’s a combination of Hexbear having a higher population of well-read communists and anarchists than most instances, and your guess that there are so many bad-faith responses that they are quickly shut down. Hexbear also doesn’t have downvotes, so people are forced to actually reply if they want to express why they disagree.
As I said in the other comment, once you stepped back and clarified your position more, you were treated better.
Yeah, I know OP is trolling. I see it is causing calls to not pull apart. Sure, maybe not every thread goes for the jugular on the hex server, but it fept by going against the grain I was a pariah immediately.
I mean at the end of the day it is petty squabbles on the internet, I just feel that we’re missing out if we don’t make a connection. Like, you seem smart, well read, and have a pretty novel world view that would interest me. I grew up in the context that communism is not of the devil, so it was terribbly disjarring that I finally saw a safe space to talk about the fallies of communism with hobby scientists on the matter.
I dunno, maybe I was devil’s advocating and triggered a healthy response. It still feels off that I felt shut up there and now I see members of that community pleading for more open communication here.
Hexbear is a space for communists and anarchists to hang out, and there’s a culture of cedeing no ground to ill-informed takes in order to help protect that space in a deeply anticommunist English-speaking internet. There’s a strong culture of requiring well-sourced, developed, and informed takes in order to go against the grain.
The reason OP is coming under attack is because it’s obviously just left-punching and baiting a response, and the post itself is ill-informed and misrepresentative.
I suggest that if you want to learn more on Hexbear, you try to use more open language. I see in that thread when you tried to be more clear that you aren’t just another anti-communist, you got kinder responses.
I did get kinder responses, that is true. Though my main take-away wasn’t a ‘wow, these guys are awesome, I wanna read everything’, more like a ‘I’ll only comment on anything political when and if I get past the literature they recommended’.
It is alright, I am sure the revolution will do just fine without my organizational skills. I am just arguing that OP is right to troll in this instance.
Again I want to emphasize, that I am really digging this convo, but I guess I have very little to lose as well. It feels like we are communicating, but I don’t think I need to ‘be the bigger man’ by understanding the other side (these are my neuroses, no shade towards you, just where I’m coming from).
I feel you do understand me, yet don’t really concede any points or validate them.
I understand you, I even agreed with what you guessed, that Hexbear gets a ton of bad-faith users and that sours interactions with better-meaning users that aren’t on their A-game. However, I also disagree, I don’t think OP is “right” to troll. As we already agreed, OP is doing so based on clear misrepresentation, it would be one thing if it had merit, but it doesn’t, so that brought on a ton of users correctly debunking OP and pointing out that left-punching isn’t productive to begin with.
You don’t need to join Hexbear, it’s totally fine to never go there if it isn’t a good fit for you. At the same time, Hexbear isn’t under the requirement to accomodate users that are antagonistic (which you at least appeared to be in the beginning, hence the backlash). It’s totally fine for you to make dbzer0 your home and maybe peak into Hexbear if you see a good meme or two.
Well, thanks for being open. I feel we still didn’t really address my concern, but that’s alright. I see OP’s post as a legit reaction to the emotions I got from there, even if they are clearly bad faith posting here.
Hey, maybe I’m just butthurt you didn’t spoon feed me where I’m wrong, so no love lost.
When has this been achieved in communism?
Cuba, USSR, PRC, etc, though these are/were socialist. Communism, in the Marxist sense (not anarchist), must be global, fully collectivized, etc, while these are examples of single states in the context of a globally capitalist-dominant system. Nevertheless, they are all examples of socialism, where as they developed as socialist countries their economies became increasingly developed and collectivized.
The USSR dissolved for myriad reasons, such as liberal reforms that set elements of the system against each other, and the PRC at one point under the Gang of Four tried to shortcut its way to communism out of a dogmatic approach to socialism, but post-reform as the PRC has been developing, it has steadily been increading the socialized character of its production. The large firms and key industries are firmly held by a proletarian state, and over time as the small and medium firms grow, these are more and more controlled by the public sector.
The USSR collapsed because of internal contradictions and oppression.
The former is partially true, (though not intrinsic to socialism, but the unique flaws in the later years of the soviet system), the latter, no. The large majority of the people supported the system and wished to retain it until the very end due to the social instability at the time, and the larger majority regret its fall. The “internal contradictions” were the liberal reforms that added elements embodied into the system that worked against a collectivized and planned economy.
The soviet economy was relatively strong, but towards the end because of liberalization, as well as problems from needing to dedicate a large proportion of production to millitarization to keep parity with the US, it began to decrease the rate of growth that was so rapid earlier on.
More importantly, it’s absolutely true that the dissolution of the USSR was avoidable. The mistakes made by the soviets towards the end don’t need to be repeated, we can learn from what worked so well with the socialist system while also not repeating their mistakes. The torch is carried on by countries that have learned, like Cuba, the PRC, etc.
Marxism is a science, and is improved through practice.
Marxism is a political religion with sacred texts, prophets, a promised paradise on earth, and superficial pseudoscientific trappings. It has killed more people than any other ideology in history.
You’re deeply unserious.
Marxists will always have a wall of text full of theoretical facts and logic to point to. Practice looks very different. It means no diversity of opinion, oppression, secret police, gulag, millions of deaths.
Contrary to you I actually know people who have lived in socialist countries. I even have a former high ranking party member in my family.
Industrialization did that, not Marxism.
Not only do Marxists have theory, we also have practice. Practice doesn’t look different from theory, actually, you’d know this if you actually understood that Marxists reject the perfect utopian wonderland from earlier socialists like Robert Owen. There is diversity in opinion, spirited debate, and many different perspectives. The bourgeoisie is indeed oppressed, as they should be. Socialist states do indeed have prisons. The “millions of deaths” you hint at, in reality, corresponds to far fewer deaths than the victims of liberalism and capitalism.
I have spoken with people that grew up in socialism, and current citizens of socialist countries like the PRC. I don’t rely on anecdotes for my stances, I read historical texts, statistics, track metrics, and engage with theory and practice. I don’t care who your family member is, I can find Flat Earthers or those who think the US is the greatest country on the planet. What matters is the actual, on the ground facts.
Industrialization in a planned fashion, with a direct focus on uplifiting the proletariat, was the cause of uplifting from poverty. Without Marxism, using England as an example, capitalism skyrocketed poverty. The working class had it far worse than as independent peasants for a long time, life expectancy dropped, and it was only when the proletariat began to organize violently did concessions come and begin to eventually surpass feudalism in England. In socialist countries, the impact was immediately positive.
You’re deeply unserious.