west west bad big bad very bad stalin good lenin good ignore starvation ignore deaths ignore everything just read state and revolution bro
west west bad big bad very bad stalin good lenin good ignore starvation ignore deaths ignore everything just read state and revolution bro
Which is literally all states ever.
Considering there’s never been an ML state that has existed longer than 100 years, I would say this is a pretty bold claim when it takes quite a long time for any form of governance to develop over time. I know as an American it’s difficult to imagine that 100 years is not that long, considering the USA is only 250 years old, but there are civilizations still around today that are 5000 years old. 100 years is not enough time to make this claim.
Literally all states are authoritarian, essentially by definition. This is not an ML problem.
The vanguard is not a class. It’s a group of people. There’s a significant difference. I know anarchists like to throw the word class around like it just means “group of people” but the vanguard is not a class.
State capitalism is literally the first sign that you’re on the path to socialism. Capitalism is a mode of production that, as far as we know, is necessary to the development of societies. Every single state will go through a period of capitalism. When a communist vanguard has led a revolution and the people’s army has established a dictatorship of the proletariat to subordinate bourgeois interests to the state, the result will ALWAYS be state capitalism. It is from state capitalism that it becomes possible to move beyond capitalism entirely, but it will take a long time of developing the productive forces and inventing all new forms of governance, contention resolution, and contradiction analysis. It’s not a choice. It’s a historical process determined by the real conditions of society.
This is ridiculous. They will violently kill any group that raises arms against them or threatens to organize a movement to contest their power. There were obviously living breathing organized factions in the USSR. There are multiple parties in China. They debate. The ONLY thing they have to agree to is democratic centralism, which means they will abide by the voting process of that has been put in place. Attempts to undermine that process will be met with authority. Attempts to undermine that process by collaborating with enemies or raising a militia will absolutely result in violent repression. That’s pretty much true of ANY revolutionary period of ANY ideology. It would have to be. If an anarchist group dismantled the state violently and then a group of people tried to raise a militia to attack the anarchists, the anarchists would absolutely attempt to stop them, with violence.
No. They’re really not. State capitalism is a prerequisite to building communism. Violently repressing reactionaries who would literally fight the state is necessary to build communism.
Absolutely. Makhno literally collaborated with anti-communist forces during the Russian Revolution. He only ever allied with the Bolsheviks when he was at risk of being destroyed by the Whites. He was fiercely anti-communist and had an army and showed that he was willing to collaborate with anyone to achieve his goals. He was a massive strategic threat to the revolution.
No. I think that was probably a mistake. I haven’t seen any evidence that the anarchists were a real threat to the revolution there. My understanding is that the Spanish MLs believed that they could only win through superior arms, and since they were getting arms from the Soviets, that they were the only chance of success. The anarchists had a severe shortage of weapons and ammunition, so I assume the thinking at that time was that the only way to win was with arms from the USSR and since the MLs had them and the anarchists were building a coalition against the MLs, that the MLs thought the only chance of revolution was through them.
In hindsight, it was an incorrect theory. At the time? I don’t know. Every revolution, including the American, French, and Russian were all fought with conventional armies in standard European-style head-on warfare. I can understand why they thought it. It turned out to be wrong and they couldn’t win with their numbers. Had this happened post Ho Chi Minh maybe they would have a more correct assessment of revolutionary conflict, the way MLs do now, and they wouldn’t have purged the non-MLs.
You see. That’s the thing about science. Just because you use science doesn’t mean you’re correct. It means you learn from your mistakes. For example, the Spanish ML purge, I think, was a mistake. A dogmatic ideology would say “You must always purge anyone who doesn’t believe what you believe” but a scientific ideology says “You must always learn from your mistakes, but you must always be willing to make mistakes”. There’s nothing scientific about a single action. The science is in the application of theory to your action (in the case of the Spanish, it was a theory of how to fight a revolutionary war) and then you must observe the results of actions and incorporate them into your theory. Mao learned lessons from all the failures and success and developed a new form of warfare. Ho learned more lessons than Mao, because Ho got to learn from Mao, and Ho invented new theories and then put them into action. Revolutionaries of today have more lessons than Ho did, because we get to analyze how the Vietnamese beat both the French and the Americans. And in fact, MLs do exactly that. They update their theories based on evidence. That’s what science is. Science isn’t being correct. Science is a process of adapting your theories to the evidence.
That’s the problem.
It is, because while they claim to want the workers to control the state, they never do, and they never will willingly ‘wither away’ as the vanguard claims.
The Vanguard enjoy a vastly different quality of life compared to the average worker. The Vanguard are not assembling iPhones for western capitalists for subsistence wages while the factory builds suicide nets around the building due to how poor the working conditions are. The Vanguard are in practice a new state-Bourgeoisie.
“Trust me bro, we just need need another 100 years of wage slavery before we can do the real communism, Marx said so, so it must be true, and the only way.”
Yeah, they just need to agree to submit themselves to the will of the Vanguard, and *everything will be fine!
(* results not guaranteed)
I’m not aware of an instance where Anarchists were the aggressor against ML’s, unlike the reverse.
If the Anarchists succeeded in creating Communism immediately without a transitional state, ML’s probably would raise a militia to end it in favor of authoritarian state capitalism, since they’re not in charge of it.
Have any non-Bolshevik sources (which are the source of many myths against Makhno, since, ya know, they betrayed him and had to make up with some legit-sounding reasons for doing it) to back up that claim?
I’m guessing you’re referring to when he took in some conscripts from Petliura’s nationalists after he defeated them? The same conscripts that would’ve then been offered to join the Bolsheviks before they turned on Makhno?
I have to give you your due here, you’re the first ML I’ve spoken to who thinks that was a mistake.
I’ve never seen any evidence for that.
While I’m glad you see it as a mistake, but it is highly worrying to see it framed as “Killing all those people unnecessarily was a mistake, a big oopsie, if you will. But you see, when ML’s commit massacres, it’s just a scientific learning experience! :D”
Like… Ech. It should be a clear example of the ends not justifying the means, which is one lesson that doesn’t ever seem to make it into modern ML offshoot theories.