Marx loved democracy. He viewed it as the most stable path to communism.
We’re seeing this play out more and more in Scandinavia.
Its never been observed in any self proclaimed communist nation with an authoritarian state. Probably because authoritarianism is antithetical to the principles of communism.
As long as there is a state, there is a ruling class. The question is which class is in the ruling position - the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. The USSR had democracy - there were voting structures up and down the entire structure of the union. There was no bourgeoisie class before the revisionists under Kruschevi liberalized. The only clas available to rule after the revolution was the working class.
Anarchists like to claim that “ruling class” is a class, but it’s not. It’s a role that a class plays. By removing the bourgeoisie class from the role of ruling class and replacing it with it with the proletariat, the proletariat becomes the ruling class.
There’s more than just those two options, e.g. the nobility (which we don’t have anymore). If you had done some research on the topic, you’d know that a class is a group that shares a common relationship to the means of production. You could perhaps argue that career politicians constitute a sort of “political class”.
The USSR had democracy - there were voting structures up and down the entire structure of the union.
In their worst election (1946), the Bloc of Communists and Non-Partisans received 99.19% of the vote. I don’t know who their opponents were, the other 0.81% of the vote simply went to “against”. Results like this are impossible in a free and fair election.
The communist party of the soviet union was in control of the country, with absolutely no accountability to the proletariat they were supposed to be representing. Were they working class? No, because they did not work. They were a new kind of nobility, with the head of state effectively being a new Tsar.
I know what a class is. Let’s break down the options you provide.
You could perhaps argue that career politicians constitute a sort of “political class”.
Some do, in fact. They have never been very convincing. It takes a very narrow view of what labor is as it is begging the question.
Let’s take manufacturing lumber, for example. Obviously the machinists in the factory producing planks are working with the means of production. Is the woodcutter? They only work with the means of extraction and they extract from nature. They are inputs to production, but are not producing anything, only destroying.
Then there’s the truck driver. The truck is produced by machinists, but the driver doesn’t produce anything. They just move things from place to place. Then there’s the people who manage quantifying the need for lumber and managing the accounting of what it costs to make the lumber and what the best way to distribute the lumber is. These people don’t work with the means of production at all.
No one really believes the above, do they? I’m sure you don’t. The politicians in a Soviet system are laboring - that is to say that they are commiting their human capabilities toward solving problems that need to be solved for society to function. Having never seen a revolutionary Marxist state ever exist, the politicians were like researchers, and again, we would not say researchers are a separate class.
I mean, maybe you would, but you’d be wrong.
The communist party of the soviet union was in control of the country, with absolutely no accountability to the proletariat they were supposed to be representing
Of course, this is just vibes. If you had done your research, you would know that the right to recall was in the constitution of the USSR creating more accountability for politicians that most democracies even today. Before Kruschev and before the war, the recall was used on something like 10% of politicians - unthinkable in the Western democracies of today.
The accountability was absolutely there. But there is some difficulty in speaking of these things because the USSR cannot be analyzed as a single phenomenon but only as a historical process, which I will get to.
Were they working class? No, because they did not work. They were a new kind of nobility, with the head of state effectively being a new Tsar.
I think I have already established that politicians, especially in communist parties, do work. Let me go a little further and start breaking down the history into stages.
Lenin clearly worked. You cannot organize a communist state after a revolution without work. I think this is undeniable. If you want to argue this, go far. There was nothing Tsarist about Lenin’s term in office.
Stalin clearly worked. It is a massive undertaking to prepare for war, especially a war that many did not believe was coming or thought that perhaps there was a way to avoid it by creating alliances. This labor ultimately became all-encompassing because doing anything else would have been enough to end the entire revolutionary project.
Then there was the post-war period. Again, Stalin clearly worked. There was so much to solve far once the Nazis were suppressed but not gone and the West was protecting them. The work of the politicians during each of these 3 period was crucial to the survival of the Soviet system. It was real work, as real as feeding your neighbors.
Then there was the rise of Kruschev. This is when the critique of nobility starts to come into play. Kruschev and his ideological partners believed in liberalism. They believed in rewards for people higher up in society. They believed in empire and the value of extractive occupation. They believed they could collaborate with the empires of the West to co-govern the world. This is the period during which politicians began to pull away from the working class and stratify into a privileged group that focused more on its own enrichment and power management than on the work of maintaining a proletarian revolution.
Stalin died without any property and without any money. He did not enrich himself through his supposed “Tsar-like” powers. Kruschev, despite his liberal leanings, also focused primarily on mass consumerism and not on luxury for politicians. It was Brezhnev that introduced serious forms of luxury to the political elite and that sharpened the contradictions that would ultimately see liberalism undo the entire Soviet project.
But, if you did any research, you would understand that there were distinct periods that could be analyzed, that they could each be compared with the Tsarist regime, that none of them bore any resemblance to the Tsarist regime, and that your claims that were attempts at stating fact could be easily refuted while your claims that were mere interpretations or feelings were only generally shared by liberals and that alternative interpretations exist that come from the successful revolutionary movements in history.
Nothing more threatening to the power of the proletariat than [checks notes] the proletariat voting.
Like, if we managed to implement a legit socialist state by our current state of bourgeois democracy, as unlikely as that is, the chance of capitalists just ‘returning’ because people vote in a semi-screwed system is pretty fucking unlikely
Why do you think liberalism is one-to-one with voting, as though no other political philosophy can have voting?
Marxism is anti-liberal, definitionally. Yet, all historical Marxist movements, including the USSR, have had voting of some form or another. What they don’t have is party politics, instead replacing parties with factions. And for good reason. But if you refuse to believe voting matter without multiple parties, then there’s no use in discussing anything other than that specific false belief until we disabuse you of it.
Why do you think liberalism is one-to-one with voting, as though no other political philosophy can have voting?
Great reading comprehension. /s
Marxism is anti-liberal, definitionally. Yet, all historical Marxist movements, including the USSR, have had voting of some form or another. What they don’t have is party politics, instead replacing parties with factions. And for good reason.
“We have a really good reason for instituting single-candidate ‘elections’ that are controlled entirely by the PEOPLE’S oligarchy!”
It’s selection by the elected officials of the parties in the majority coalition.
In a single party situation, elections are multi-candidate where there are multiple candidates available - this was seen in the USSR and is seen in China, and like the USA or many places in Europe, some races only have one candidate just simply by virtue of the office.
There are other offices that are not selected by popular vote. All democracies have these too, both liberal democracies and Marxist democracies. Some of these offices are appointed, some of these offices are elected from within specific committees or other bodies.
You can study the Soviet system, too, ya know. It’s not illegal. You can learn all about the workers councils, the right to recall, the Congress of Soviets, etc.
Of course, in 1936 they got rid of the Congress of Soviets and added universal direct sufferage well ahead of any liberal democracy, and they added the right to rest and leisure, right to care in old age and sickness, right to housing, etc.
It also constitutionally enshrined the equality of women and of all peoples regardless of nationality/race. Very fascist, I know.
What was very anti-democratic was when Stalin a year later had been purging political opponents and made all the elections single-candidate elections because he was “paranoid” about the emergence of counter-revolutionary powers taking over.
I put paranoid in quotes because immediately after Stalin left office, Kruschev took over and began the liberalization of the USSR complete with attempts to collaborate with the West in an effort to divide up the world and build a Soviet Empire. So Stalin wasn’t wrong that there was a large threat of counter-revolutionaries trying to get power. He just failed to stop them from taking power. He only delayed them long enough for the USSR to save Europe from the Nazis.
It’s selection by the elected officials of the parties in the majority coalition.
Those ‘elected’ in single-candidate elections. Wow.
That you go on to simp for Stalin and the entire Stalinist system is unsurprising. Red fascists just can’t help themselves. Boot leather is too tasty to resist, apparently. Next you can tell me how the DPRK is a good and holsum worker’s democracy because it says it is. I’m sure just thinking about that level of fascist apologia makes your mouth water.
I mean, the DPRK has gone from being bombed into the stone age by the US where the citizens literally lived in caves to avoid being hit with napalm to building amusement parks, nuclear weapons, and computers. You can’t actually achieve that with slave labor, this is well known. It requires intrinsic motivation, and I can think of no better intrinsic motivation than rebuilding my country from the ground up next to my neighbors in defiance of the brutal fascism of the West.
I get that it helps you to feel like a rebel to imagine that there are zero examples of successful alternatives to the West, but you end up supporting the narratives of fascist imperialists without narry a thought to how closely you are aligned with them. You wouldn’t be bothered at all if the US managed to destroy the DPRK, the PRC, Iran, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Laos. You’d think it serves them right for being fascists while the actual fascists were committing mass murder and consolidating their global dominance over 99% of the human population on the planet. And it would be OK, because you have the correct reasoning and proper liberatory line and one day, you will be out in the streets fighting that empire to build the first ever real attempt at liberation, without any hint of self awareness as the autonomous weapons systems hunt you down.
Why would it be unlikely every society is going to experience tragedies and down turns. Just then need a strong man backed by a bunch of money. Also think about it. Actually making everyone OK DOES actually cost money. That means that at least some extra taxes are taken from regular people to ensure that those less fortunate or less intelligent or capable are taken care of.
This means there is legit cause for 50%+ of the population to grumble. If everyone is insane to imagine themselves a billionaire most can easily imagine themselves in the top half who would have more if they didn’t have to support those insert negative stereotype here.
This is ultimately an insane complaint because ultimately a re-alignment back towards today would involve taking far more from the common man to give to the rich than returning what is taken from the common man and the vast majority would be worse off but the average person is a moron.
No no no you just don’t get it: a rational dialect-materialist examination of civilization proves that our social and economic development is constantly evolving due to unshakable opposing forces.
Yes but the alternative is no democracy. Democracy is flawed even when operating correctly, but it the greatest equalizing tool humanity has ever invented, and Marx recognized it
Communism but within the framework of liberal democracy so the capitalists can simply walk back into power 😩👍🏼
Your comment:
Yes but the alternative is no democracy
My interpretation is of that is the original comment is saying the problem with liberal democracy is that it lets the capitalists retake control and you saying that if we don’t allow the possibility for the capitaliststo retake control then it’s not real democracy.
Communism but within the framework of liberal democracy so the capitalists can simply walk back into power 😩👍🏼
Marx loved democracy. He viewed it as the most stable path to communism.
We’re seeing this play out more and more in Scandinavia.
Its never been observed in any self proclaimed communist nation with an authoritarian state. Probably because authoritarianism is antithetical to the principles of communism.
You are joking, right?
Scandinavian countries objectively embody the teachings of Marx greater than any autocratic self proclaimed country.
This is simply reality.
Yeah, scandinavian countries who allow corporations to exploit and kill workers in africa so they can fund pensions. Right
Without democracy, you simply create a new ruling class. Workers had no say in the Soviet Union, even less than they had in the US back then.
As long as there is a state, there is a ruling class. The question is which class is in the ruling position - the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. The USSR had democracy - there were voting structures up and down the entire structure of the union. There was no bourgeoisie class before the revisionists under Kruschevi liberalized. The only clas available to rule after the revolution was the working class.
Anarchists like to claim that “ruling class” is a class, but it’s not. It’s a role that a class plays. By removing the bourgeoisie class from the role of ruling class and replacing it with it with the proletariat, the proletariat becomes the ruling class.
There’s more than just those two options, e.g. the nobility (which we don’t have anymore). If you had done some research on the topic, you’d know that a class is a group that shares a common relationship to the means of production. You could perhaps argue that career politicians constitute a sort of “political class”.
In their worst election (1946), the Bloc of Communists and Non-Partisans received 99.19% of the vote. I don’t know who their opponents were, the other 0.81% of the vote simply went to “against”. Results like this are impossible in a free and fair election.
The communist party of the soviet union was in control of the country, with absolutely no accountability to the proletariat they were supposed to be representing. Were they working class? No, because they did not work. They were a new kind of nobility, with the head of state effectively being a new Tsar.
I know what a class is. Let’s break down the options you provide.
Some do, in fact. They have never been very convincing. It takes a very narrow view of what labor is as it is begging the question.
Let’s take manufacturing lumber, for example. Obviously the machinists in the factory producing planks are working with the means of production. Is the woodcutter? They only work with the means of extraction and they extract from nature. They are inputs to production, but are not producing anything, only destroying.
Then there’s the truck driver. The truck is produced by machinists, but the driver doesn’t produce anything. They just move things from place to place. Then there’s the people who manage quantifying the need for lumber and managing the accounting of what it costs to make the lumber and what the best way to distribute the lumber is. These people don’t work with the means of production at all.
No one really believes the above, do they? I’m sure you don’t. The politicians in a Soviet system are laboring - that is to say that they are commiting their human capabilities toward solving problems that need to be solved for society to function. Having never seen a revolutionary Marxist state ever exist, the politicians were like researchers, and again, we would not say researchers are a separate class.
I mean, maybe you would, but you’d be wrong.
Of course, this is just vibes. If you had done your research, you would know that the right to recall was in the constitution of the USSR creating more accountability for politicians that most democracies even today. Before Kruschev and before the war, the recall was used on something like 10% of politicians - unthinkable in the Western democracies of today.
The accountability was absolutely there. But there is some difficulty in speaking of these things because the USSR cannot be analyzed as a single phenomenon but only as a historical process, which I will get to.
I think I have already established that politicians, especially in communist parties, do work. Let me go a little further and start breaking down the history into stages.
Lenin clearly worked. You cannot organize a communist state after a revolution without work. I think this is undeniable. If you want to argue this, go far. There was nothing Tsarist about Lenin’s term in office.
Stalin clearly worked. It is a massive undertaking to prepare for war, especially a war that many did not believe was coming or thought that perhaps there was a way to avoid it by creating alliances. This labor ultimately became all-encompassing because doing anything else would have been enough to end the entire revolutionary project.
Then there was the post-war period. Again, Stalin clearly worked. There was so much to solve far once the Nazis were suppressed but not gone and the West was protecting them. The work of the politicians during each of these 3 period was crucial to the survival of the Soviet system. It was real work, as real as feeding your neighbors.
Then there was the rise of Kruschev. This is when the critique of nobility starts to come into play. Kruschev and his ideological partners believed in liberalism. They believed in rewards for people higher up in society. They believed in empire and the value of extractive occupation. They believed they could collaborate with the empires of the West to co-govern the world. This is the period during which politicians began to pull away from the working class and stratify into a privileged group that focused more on its own enrichment and power management than on the work of maintaining a proletarian revolution.
Stalin died without any property and without any money. He did not enrich himself through his supposed “Tsar-like” powers. Kruschev, despite his liberal leanings, also focused primarily on mass consumerism and not on luxury for politicians. It was Brezhnev that introduced serious forms of luxury to the political elite and that sharpened the contradictions that would ultimately see liberalism undo the entire Soviet project.
But, if you did any research, you would understand that there were distinct periods that could be analyzed, that they could each be compared with the Tsarist regime, that none of them bore any resemblance to the Tsarist regime, and that your claims that were attempts at stating fact could be easily refuted while your claims that were mere interpretations or feelings were only generally shared by liberals and that alternative interpretations exist that come from the successful revolutionary movements in history.
Nothing more threatening to the power of the proletariat than [checks notes] the proletariat voting.
Like, if we managed to implement a legit socialist state by our current state of bourgeois democracy, as unlikely as that is, the chance of capitalists just ‘returning’ because people vote in a semi-screwed system is pretty fucking unlikely
How will that happen tho
Why do you think liberalism is one-to-one with voting, as though no other political philosophy can have voting?
Marxism is anti-liberal, definitionally. Yet, all historical Marxist movements, including the USSR, have had voting of some form or another. What they don’t have is party politics, instead replacing parties with factions. And for good reason. But if you refuse to believe voting matter without multiple parties, then there’s no use in discussing anything other than that specific false belief until we disabuse you of it.
Great reading comprehension. /s
“We have a really good reason for instituting single-candidate ‘elections’ that are controlled entirely by the PEOPLE’S oligarchy!”
Fuck off, red fascist.
Wait until you find out how prime ministers are elected.
Through single-candidate elections controlled by unelected apparatchiks?
I don’t think you’ve ever followed government formation in your fucking life, fascist.
It’s selection by the elected officials of the parties in the majority coalition.
In a single party situation, elections are multi-candidate where there are multiple candidates available - this was seen in the USSR and is seen in China, and like the USA or many places in Europe, some races only have one candidate just simply by virtue of the office.
There are other offices that are not selected by popular vote. All democracies have these too, both liberal democracies and Marxist democracies. Some of these offices are appointed, some of these offices are elected from within specific committees or other bodies.
You can study the Soviet system, too, ya know. It’s not illegal. You can learn all about the workers councils, the right to recall, the Congress of Soviets, etc.
Of course, in 1936 they got rid of the Congress of Soviets and added universal direct sufferage well ahead of any liberal democracy, and they added the right to rest and leisure, right to care in old age and sickness, right to housing, etc.
It also constitutionally enshrined the equality of women and of all peoples regardless of nationality/race. Very fascist, I know.
What was very anti-democratic was when Stalin a year later had been purging political opponents and made all the elections single-candidate elections because he was “paranoid” about the emergence of counter-revolutionary powers taking over.
I put paranoid in quotes because immediately after Stalin left office, Kruschev took over and began the liberalization of the USSR complete with attempts to collaborate with the West in an effort to divide up the world and build a Soviet Empire. So Stalin wasn’t wrong that there was a large threat of counter-revolutionaries trying to get power. He just failed to stop them from taking power. He only delayed them long enough for the USSR to save Europe from the Nazis.
Those ‘elected’ in single-candidate elections. Wow.
That you go on to simp for Stalin and the entire Stalinist system is unsurprising. Red fascists just can’t help themselves. Boot leather is too tasty to resist, apparently. Next you can tell me how the DPRK is a good and holsum worker’s democracy because it says it is. I’m sure just thinking about that level of fascist apologia makes your mouth water.
I mean, the DPRK has gone from being bombed into the stone age by the US where the citizens literally lived in caves to avoid being hit with napalm to building amusement parks, nuclear weapons, and computers. You can’t actually achieve that with slave labor, this is well known. It requires intrinsic motivation, and I can think of no better intrinsic motivation than rebuilding my country from the ground up next to my neighbors in defiance of the brutal fascism of the West.
I get that it helps you to feel like a rebel to imagine that there are zero examples of successful alternatives to the West, but you end up supporting the narratives of fascist imperialists without narry a thought to how closely you are aligned with them. You wouldn’t be bothered at all if the US managed to destroy the DPRK, the PRC, Iran, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Laos. You’d think it serves them right for being fascists while the actual fascists were committing mass murder and consolidating their global dominance over 99% of the human population on the planet. And it would be OK, because you have the correct reasoning and proper liberatory line and one day, you will be out in the streets fighting that empire to build the first ever real attempt at liberation, without any hint of self awareness as the autonomous weapons systems hunt you down.
Why would it be unlikely every society is going to experience tragedies and down turns. Just then need a strong man backed by a bunch of money. Also think about it. Actually making everyone OK DOES actually cost money. That means that at least some extra taxes are taken from regular people to ensure that those less fortunate or less intelligent or capable are taken care of.
This means there is legit cause for 50%+ of the population to grumble. If everyone is insane to imagine themselves a billionaire most can easily imagine themselves in the top half who would have more if they didn’t have to support those insert negative stereotype here.
This is ultimately an insane complaint because ultimately a re-alignment back towards today would involve taking far more from the common man to give to the rich than returning what is taken from the common man and the vast majority would be worse off but the average person is a moron.
So the solution is to ban factionalism and have the state preëmptively run by an opposing strongman?
Should the government not be ran according to the consent of the governed? The solution is not less democracy.
No no no you just don’t get it: a rational dialect-materialist examination of civilization proves that our social and economic development is constantly evolving due to unshakable opposing forces.
But if we throw all that away and install a Red Proletariat© government then everything somehow collapses into a happy representative system that is totally stable and can never change. Don’t ask any more questions or you’re a counter-revolutionary.
Ya I’m not a communist I just said that democracy remains and will remain at risk no matter what we achieve.
My bad, wrong comment chain. Fully agree tho
Didn’t say that we shouldn’t just saying that saying failure remains entirely likely
Yes but the alternative is no democracy. Democracy is flawed even when operating correctly, but it the greatest equalizing tool humanity has ever invented, and Marx recognized it
Liberal party-based democracy is not the only form of democracy
And where did I say it was
You said the alternative to liberal democracy is no democracy
No, I said the alternative to democracy is no democracy. If you want to argue semantics then knock your self out
Original comment
Your comment:
My interpretation is of that is the original comment is saying the problem with liberal democracy is that it lets the capitalists retake control and you saying that if we don’t allow the possibility for the capitaliststo retake control then it’s not real democracy.
Did I misunderstand you?