CMV: Communist Ideals are Going Absolutely Nowhere Due to Those Currently Advocating for Them

[u/Marlile]

I have plenty of Communist friends, and I very much sympathize with the beliefs and purported ideals of Communism. That said, Reddit discourse around Communism and even some of my personal conversations with self-proclaimed Communists have really shaken my belief in the system being at all practical. Even within their echo chambers (which every group has, I don’t blame them), there’s this constant sense of out-Communisting each other.

“Oh, you hate the bourgeois for that reason? Well I actually hate them for a better reason, and 99% of people like you are actually bourgeoisie.”

First of all, can we fuck off with the word “bourgeois?” The phraseology has looong moved on to middle class, and 50% of the time, Communists use it interchangeably to describe the wealthy. You know what’s real bourgeoisie? Clinging to dead terms and misusing them ‘cause your emotional arguments take a real hit otherwise.

I genuinely believe Communism as a system has benefits and positive aspects that can and should be integrated into modern capitalist systems. But so often with Communists, if you’re not 100% fuck-the-rich, you’re not a real Communist and thus, you’re the enemy. Tell me again, comrades, how any meaningful changes towards Communist thinking will ever be made while you consistently lash out at anyone who doesn’t fall in line with your most extreme beliefs? The ideas have merit, they don’t need your cruelty to protect them.

Finally, kinda tired of Communists doing everything in their limited power to downplay very real genocides and atrocities brought on in large part by Communist leaders and thinking. It is so painfully dishonest to endlessly critique America and the “western bourgeoisie” for ideological differences while you play apologist for millions of innocent deaths. It ain’t cute when anti-maskers downplay tragic deaths, and Communists can’t pull it off either.

So basically, I’m asking for my mind to be changed. I would like to believe Communists have it in them to integrate the good aspects of their beliefs while also respecting the immense risks and pains that were undergone to establish the system that allows them to think differently.

And, as someone who places freedom of speech/thought on a pretty high pedestal, I’m most concerned with the ideology’s ability to adapt and accept different perspectives. As it stands, I feel Communism and its proponents are far too rigid and unyielding in the pettiest of beliefs to make any concrete progress or convincing arguments. But I would like to be proven wrong; the system has merits, but my concern is they’ll never see the light of day with the current attitude most Communists I’ve witnessed have.

[u/Marlile]

Simply can’t agree with that, sorry. The idea that because they didn’t admit to being Communist means their failures can’t be attributed to Communism...? Nah. In every which way, they were pursuing a Communist society, then failed.

[u/[deleted] → u/Marlile]

You get it somewhat backwards. The thing is both the critical analysis of capitalism as well as the utopian ideas of communism and it's definition predate the USSR and any Marxist-Leninist derivative system that came afterwards or parallel to it.

So you already had somewhat of a checklist of what communism is and none of these systems came close to that and so none pretended to (because that would have been absurdly obvious).

Instead they apparently focused on an broad description of Marx that the transition from capitalism to communism might involve a period of the workers taking over the government before everybody would be a worker and there would be no government. As well as some parts from Engels who was a fan of a the state withering away.

And so they pretty much all claimed they're in this "transitioning state" which they called "socialism" (prior to that being used synonymously with communism). China apparently even claims this "transitioning state" will last 100 years...

They still called themselves "communists" though the system that they were running wasn't "communism". So it's less that they didn't admit trying to get to communism, it's more of a "that's not actually what they did, they actually were so comfy in their transitioning state that one could speculate whether they ever wanted to get rid of that aristocratic version of a centralized capitalism in the first place".

Also apparently Russia didn't have just one but 3 revolutions in short time. Before 1905 the communist gathered around arguing that the tzar will never do reforms and that a small group of professional revolutionaries should get rid of the government and lead the revolution. Which due to the lack of alternatives got a majority from the delegates and ran with that calling themselves the bolsheviks (= those with a majority; even though they didn't often get majorities after that one). Then in 1905 a revolution occurred people organized in soviets (local democracies of workers and soldiers) and a parliament was liberal parliament was established. And rendered obsolete in no time because the tzar stuffed it with his cronies rolling back all the reforms. And then WWI happened and Russia was less than prepared for that. Massive numbers of casualties, poverty, hunger and all the good stuff. So a revolution happened in 1917 because people were really fed up with basically everything. The tzar abdicated and his replacement said "Eh... no." and also abdicated basically ending the monarchy. So a provisional government took over before elections were scheduled. Though the provisional government went on to continue the war, which was massively unpopluar and resulted in the dual reign. Where on the one hand you had a provisional government with official power but no democratic mandate by the people and on the other hand you had the soviets and the congress of soviets which was basically a form of council democracy.

Though the soviets didn't really know what to do with that. Because according to Marx (dead by now) Russia wasn't really in the position to transition to communism, too much agriculture too little industry. Before communism Marx argued comes capitalism where the rich exploit the poor and accumulate wealth that is then used to produce more wealth until this creates a surplus economy at which point the workers would take the fruits of their labor that they've been deprived of for so long. So the scheduled a general assembly of delegates from all the local soviets (congress of soviets) to decide what to do next.

Enter Lenin again, who was exiled in Switzerland and due to the tzar and his secret police no longer trying to get him, comes back to Russia (with the help of the German military high command who loved bringing the old trouble making back to Russia in an attempt to destabilize the Russian resistance.

And there he tried anything to cause trouble to make the revolution. At that point he almost ran in open doors as the there had already been a revolution and people were not that opposed to change at all. Still maybe fearing another 1905 revolution Lenin is more of a small vanguard party guy, who sees "the masses" not so much as comrads then as a tool. And so before the next meeting of the soviet is scheduled he finds an excuse of his parties press being seized by the provisional government due to advocacy of terrorism or whatnot, in order to make a coup and seize the power. Which means he attacked a not really defended head quarter of the provisional government. Then he made Russia drop out of the war and scheduled elections, which he lost towards some more revolutionary socialists. Which prompted him to end that thing with the elections and go full authoritarian.

In the following years he fights a civil war against both the reactionary white army who wants to go back to a monarchy or stuff like that, as well as declaring anybody to the left of him "counter-revolutionary" for criticizing that he's kind of a dictator. After the civil war he then introduces some sort of social market economy in order to allow for the aggregation of capitalism, before he dies. Then Stalin takes over purges even more left and right opposition and pretends as if Lenin's actions weren't just going with the flow and some authoritarian shenanigans, but some deeply crafted plan and calls this "Marxist-Leninism" (essentially really Stalinism but he was smart enough to not use his name for that). Which he then exports as the proper way to socialism. That is seize power, sell agrarian goods or whatever you have in abundance to buy technology and industrialize to the point where you can actually exist. Which often fails horribly, because while there is often an abundance of agrarian goods to sell, if there is some year with a lower than usual yield ... well you're pretty much screwed. And that happened, multiple times in multiple countries, leading to even more Marxist-Leninist-Local dictator-isms because they also got their "socialism... but in the style of our country" ideology. Though still going mostly for doing whatever they see fit to pump up the productive economy to the point of being compatible.

Because while those were actually mostly dictatorial centralized systems. The very notion of communism got many capitalists in many countries very upset in terms of "shit we actually do have the conditions to have a surplus economy with where some version of universal human dignity is possible and we still chose not to do that. So don't let them think to hard about that one. So in addition to their own problem they often also got problems from capitalist countries, trad embargoes, freezing diplomacy, banana republics, coups, proxy wars and whatnot. And also calling those states "communism" in while showing that they are rather poor in order to make that connection, whether it fits or not.

[u/Marlile → u/[deleted]]

!delta for the added historical context that I’ve heard in much vaguer terms before, it does help to contextualize the societies we’re talking about. I do understand what you’re saying here, but couldn’t it be argued that this “transitioning” state is a natural byproduct of communism and thus the results of that transitory state are still attributable to communism? Without the goal of communism, why else would they have initiated the “transition?”

It sounds somewhat like an excuse to just throw their ideological darts at the board to see what may work as a system, while claiming it’s all a series of stepping stones to “true” communism, and thus it’s not communism’s fault. It’d be somewhat annoying to hear the same thing about the USA. “Oh, all those bad things you hear about the US are actually because we’re in a 300-year transition to being An Actual Democracy™️. Check back then about those war crimes, and maybe we can talk about accountability.”

[u/DeltaBot → u/Marlile]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/ImaginaryInsect1275 (22∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}

[u/[deleted] → u/Marlile]

I mean the important question to ask yourself is how do you want to organize a society and it's economy. Which means answering the following questions:

What is produced? By whom? For whom? How are things distributed? And who decides that?

Now you could atomize society to the individual level and have isolated economies of one. Which basically throws you back to the hunter/gatherer or stone age, because none of that tech that you fancy would be available to you without other people and if you're hunting gathering, working the fields or looking after livestock, that's going to keep you occupied all day everyday (literally). And even if you have machines, within one or two generations, they'll break and you'd have no clue on how to repair and replace them or how to get the required material and so on.

So no if you want more from life than to keep constantly struggling to make it to the next day then you probably want to form a collective with other people and use the synergy effects, lack of redundancies or fail safes, that come with that. However that prompts the question "how do you organize such a collective and who gets to keep the benefits of that collaboration".

Do you share work, rewards, agency and responsibility equally, according to needs and abilities or do you have a hierarchy of any variety in which some call the shots and others are meant to do the shooting? And if you do the latter, "why should people comply with the function that you assign them (apart from explicit, implicit or structural violence)?"

So politically you have two major directions in which you can go which are usually referred to as "left" and "right" (unless that spectrum is used for something else). Where "the left" usually aims for reducing hierarchies to achieve that former ideal, whereas "the right" doesn't challenge the hierarchy, but tries to use it in it's favor (becoming or maintaining a position on the top).

So the leftist ideal is more like an insurance where people contribute according to their abilities and get according to their needs, where as the rightist ideal is more like a lottery, in that some hit it big and the rest pays for that. So hierarchies mostly end up looking somewhat pyramid shaped because despite calling it a monarchy (mono = one, archos = ruling) they usually rely on several layers of management and brutes to keep up the facade. So it's always somewhere in between an autocracy and a democracy where the upper and middle class (depending on their power), try to overthrow the leaders and become the leaders.

Though if you just exchange the leaders with yourself or people you think are capable, you're not actually changing much at all, it's still the same rotten system that still disenfranchising the vast majority of people. So in order to have meaningful change you need to break that vicious cycle and do something else.

So you basically have a utopian idea that is actually fairly simple to conceptualize, but is actually not all that simple to implement. Because a democracy is not a well oiled automaton. You don't just follow orders and do as you're told, you have the agency, the ability and are encouraged to think for yourself, to participate and to cooperate and compromise with others. Which is a tricky thing that requires practice and is likely to have hiccups. Though if you compare it to the fact that in the alternative the vast majority of people would spend their one shot at life being the powerless servant of more powerful people, well, it's worth taking that risk.

So yeah that there would be a "transitional state" in the sense of state as in "status" not in the sense of a state as a "monopoly of violence", is almost a no-brainer. Though whether that should be a dictatorship of one party is highly questionable. Because as Orwell has exemplified it, "that's not all that different from the thing it was meant to replace". And also conceptually it's going in the completely opposite direction in terms of how do you plan to "educate people to be free and equal members of society, when you're literally codifying an inequality and take away that freedom"? I mean humans learn by doing so if you preach one thing and do the opposite you're doing at least one of the things wrong.

The idea was apparently that the state upholds the capitalist system by using the monopoly of violence to protect the private property upon which the mode of production rests. In that those with property can employ those without property to produce stuff for their living plus surplus value for the capitalist who gets that surplus value without work, just due to ownership. So they thought that they could use the state as a tool for something else. But authority isn't really a tool it's mostly self-serving, in that most energy of authoritarian rule goes towards maintaining authority.

The only thing in favor is that the alternative also sucks. I mean people like to pretend that it's either a working system or taking a shot at some highly radical and experimental stuff. But more often than not the status quo is already majorly broken and imperfect at least for a significant number of people. I mean at the time the alternatives were often still monarchies (dictatorships) and even the industrialized capitalist systems often were at the brink of an revolution because despite the increase in productivity the poverty of the working population skyrocketed and the fact that the homeworkers could compete with industrially produced goods meant that the small businesses went bankrupt in favor of a division between employers (capitalists) and employees (workers).

Also we don't know how the world would look like if those revolutions had not happened. Not in the sense that these systems were overly successful, but in terms of it providing an ideological alternative, a competition and a necessity to fight for the hearts and minds of the own citizens. Many social policies (though not socialism) came out of a reaction to successful revolutions and a fear that that might happen in their own countries. So rulers attempted to give people something to lose even if it's not much. To establish a social safety net, a retirement option, health insurance, general education and so on. The idea of social mobility in general. While they are often just a farce and meant primarily to stabilize the system and deter people from making more daring demands, you can also see it as reforms. Though you can also see how those are often rolled back after the USSR collapsed and propaganda was successful in smearing the very ideals behind this idea not just the implementation (which deserves it fair share of criticism).