Afaik this happened with every single instance of a communist country. Communism seems like a pretty good idea on the surface, but then why does it always become autocratic?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely
Those who seek power least deserve it
I think those quotes answer your question well enough
Simple. Power corrupts. Even with a socialist government there is always gonna be power hungry people seeking authority over their constituents. Think of the majority as sheep, comfortable with being herded and the power hungerers as the wolves slavering to enslave them.
Thats like asking why North Korea became a dictatorship when it is a people’s democracy.
Power gaps get filled, small states get conquered.
ITT
First, and above all else, there are assholes (US) who will prevent you from having nice things. Democracy is the easiest vector to let CIA/money get a corrupt asshole into power. Democracy tends to be a fiction anyway. Money/CIA/Media control is just part of the reason. Should you let corrupt assholes vote or run for power?
A country that has an army has dictatorial power, whether there is a theater of elections or not. An autocratic chain of command controls it, and if you don’t behave, regardless of your constitution, you get smacked by the army.
In the US, there is communism for the corporatist oligarchy. Government they own will protect them from competition and bail them out when they fail. The CIA/media defines the communists as anyone who is not as pro business as the most pro business corporatist oligarch. US is a pure dictatorship in that Israel first corporatist oligarchy is guaranteed to win every seat/election, or 95%+ of the seats anyway. Every NATO country has a CIA allegiant party leader is also guaranteed to produce a CIA allegiant government. CIA vets all appointments to EU government to be pro US dictatorial NATO. IMF has 50%+ of votes all from US colonies.
Celebrating media simplifications of Democracy vs. non-US-compliant is the wrong metric to apply to nations. Industrial policy meant to promote equitable prosperity or defense from Imperialist forces determined to subjugate them are more important to a nation than what US media describes them as. “Everyone” loved Russia when they had Yeltsin as a puppet privatizing everything cheaply to US interests, just as they love Zelensky for the same. Ukraine, since US coup, is an apartheid ethnostate, which cannot qualify for any objective definition of democracy (we praise it for it anyway), and recently has suspended all elections.
Because there was never anything communist about these states in any way whatsoever.
Communism is a state (as in a social, political and economic condition, not a government). None of these states ever reached this condition, and, therefore, was never communist. And, one could argue, that their development literally went the opposite way to what could be called communist with a straight face. As the anarchist Bakunin famously said, “the people’s boot is still a boot.”
This is why the Maoist-types call this shit “democratic centralism,” which is essentially just double-speak for “what the party says goes.”
This does not make the idea of communism invalid - but it’s still as perfectly vague as ever, unfortunately.
Because, at a high level, communism requires that a leader or group of leaders get things on track and then give up all of their power over time. Instead, the type of people who tend to lead revolutions are the same type of people who are unlikely to want to give up power and instead end up wanting more power. So no true communism has ever existed because it never gets to that phase.
That’s Leninist “Communism”.
As a reminder, Lenin lost the 1917 election and then seized power to make himself a dictator, then wrote about how dictators are essential to communism.
The Truth is that Dictators are anathema to communism. A dictator who seizes the means of production is called a king, and the people are then called serfs. It’s a full step backwards in the pursuit of the communist dream.
In 1917, there were 2 governments, the Worker and Peasant supported Soviet Government, and the Bourgeoisie and Petite Bourgeoisie supported liberal Provisional Government. Lenin was elected via the Soviet system, and the Socialist Revolutionaries were elected in the bourgeois controlled Provisional Government. After the election, the Soviet Government disbanded the Provisional Government via revolution, the same measures proposed by Marx the entire time.
Secondly, Lenin never once wrote about how dictators are essential to Communism. Lenin fully believed in Soviet Democracy, ie workers councils, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a term coined by Karl Marx to describe a Socialist State that had not fully absorbed all Capital into the Public Sector, and thus had to suppress the still existing Bourgeoisie. The reason for this is that Capital can only be wrested by the degree to which it develops! Per Engels:
Question 17 : Will it be possible to abolish private property at one stroke?
Answer : No, no more than the existing productive forces can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. Hence, the proletarian revolution, which in all probability is approaching, will be able gradually to transform existing society and abolish private property only when the necessary means of production have been created in sufficient quantity.
Dictators are indeed antithetical to Communism, but you’ve entirely misframed Marx, Lenin, the USSR, and the October Revolution. The Soviet Republic in control of a largely Publicly Owned, Centrally Planned economy is in no way comparable to feudalism, but is actually existing Socialism.
Funilly enough, Lenin described exactly what you’re now doing in The State and Revolution:
What is now happening to Marx’s teaching has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the teachings of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their teachings with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time emasculating the essence of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the working-class movement concur in this “doctoring” of Marxism. They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of this teaching, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently, German bourgeois scholars, but yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they aver, educated the workers’ unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of conducting a predatory war!
It’s funny that you describe Communism as a “dream,” it accurately depicts your idealistic understanding of it, along with your “reminder.”
Theoretically, one could spontaneously be created from scratch starting with a small group of people on a new world who have never experienced a centralized form of government. Formal governing is not required if the society is small enough and there are no outside forces at work to create a threat. But once governing is required, there will generally be forces at work that will centralize it. The only exception might be in a society with very limited need for cooperation due to plentiful resources available to all, such as a utopia like Star Trek’s Earth.
In all other, realistic scenarios, there will need to be a revolution. That will always be led by a person or group of people to organize the overthrow and coordinate the changes. This group will inevitably be in search of power themselves, corrupted by the power they are given, or infiltrated by those in search of such power and are unlikely to give up that power.
That village that talks out their problems and thus needs no government is A, a fiction, and B, a form of extreme democracy. Every decision is discussed and agreed upon by the group. That’s extreme democracy.
And if you push for more democracy, you can get it. But you have to resist the revolutionaries and the fascists. All while prepping to be a revolutionary if required.
Work within the system as much as possible, because when it’s gone, when that fragile peace is broken, nothing good can come out. As you said, the revolution is inevitably betrayed.
Now if we could actually teach people what a Tariff is. Fuckers voting for Trump wanting to bring prices down, when that’s exactly the opposite of what happens with a Tariff. And Democrats abandoning their base to chase a mythical center that just does not exist…
I understand the push for revolution. I just know that in order for things to get better, the transition to communism needs to happen slowly and democratically.
This is an incorrect interpretation of the phrase “withering away of the state,” which I elaborated on here.
I’m not really talking about Marxist communism. See my other comment, but in any realistic scenarios, communism is unlikely to form spontaneously as the first form of government in a new society.
And since revolution on a large scale requires centralized coordination and leadership, there will always be someone or some group given centralized power that is unlikely to allow for decentralization to happen on a large scale and is actually more likely to grab the power of the previous government system and keep it centralized, “for the good of the people” or “to defend the people” or whatever. Even well meaning revolutionaries are highly likely to crave control and be unlikely to want to allow “someone else” to change what they put in place. This then leaves in place the centralization indefinitely and never leads to communism.
Communism is centralized. Central Planning and Public Ownership are the core foundations of the economy in Communism. You’re talking about Anarchism as though Marxists were trying to achieve that, and you’re calling Anarchism “Communism.”
But communism is less centralized than representative democracy or dictatorship or whatever the pre-revolution government likely was. These portions of the government must decentralize as part of the process of moving between government types. That decentralization is essential or it’s not true communism, it’s the fake things that pretend to be communism like PRC, USSR, DPRK, etc.
The only way that some amount of decentralization doesn’t need to happen is if were talking about a society with no previous need for government forming into a communist state, which is what I mentioned was extremely unlikely, even if there were societies isolated enough to still exist without any form of centralized government.
No, Communism is centralization. It isn’t less decentralized than pre-revolution government, but more. That’s the point, to fold the entire private sector eventually into the Public, with Central Planning. You keep saying “decentralization is essential for Communism” but that’s Anarchism. AES are examples of Socialist States trying to work towards Communism.
Where on Earth are you getting your ideas? It certainly isn’t Marx.
Marx opined that certain material conditions had to be achieved before a socialist state could be successfully made. These material conditions include bourgeois capitalist democracy. Marx explicitly said that capitalism forges the tools with which it will be destroyed.
A certain subset of communists known as Marxist-Leninists decided that bourgeois capitalist democracy wasn’t necessary if you just oppressed people REALLY hard, you could skip straight to a socialist state. And because they ‘succeeded’ in overthrowing traditional Marxists in 1917 Russia and getting the full power of a massive country to spread their ideology, they’ve had bootlickers calling their particular brand of insanity the only ‘real’ form of communism ever since.
When we think of ‘communist’ countries, we think of Marxist-Leninist countries which tried to jump from feudal societies to socialist societies, which, quite obviously from the results, doesn’t work. Doesn’t stop the cultists from licking boots, of course.
There’s also a story in the hammer and sickle itself. It was spun as a symbol of ‘all workers’ but its original purpose was to depict an alliance between farmers (who owned the land they worked) and the tiny population of wage earners in Russia’s largest cities (who didn’t even own their homes). The farmers saw no reason for the new policies so concessions had to be made.
Lenin’s Russia had to leverage the state apparatus to fiercely industrialize and capitalize, effectively creating an enormous business conglomerate with a company store that encompassed nearly every product in the nation outside the black market. But with all the complacency of abject monopoly. They couldn’t skip generalized capitalism, and so they created it in a way that seriously disadvantaged workers as capitalism does.
In other words: state monopoly capitalism. Wrong direction from marxist withering of state: instead seeks to establish a permanent totalizing state, oppressing all, including the vanguard. Stalin’s paranoia metastasized and now oligarchs pick over the bones.
Realistically anybody who can take control of a country is a bit of a ruthless cunt, and ones that take over in an armed uprising especially so.
It’s not a massive shock that some of them don’t want to give up the crown once they’ve got it.
Even in so called democracies, we basically get to choose our “king” from a heavily vetted list. It ain’t going to be people like me and you rising to the top.
There’s a lot of confusion in these comments regarding Marxist theory, presumably from people who haven’t actually engaged with the source material, so I want to clarify something I see repeated frequently in this thread with little pushback. The Marxist theory of the State is not the same as the Anarchist, nor the liberal. Marx defined the State as a tool of class oppression.
The reason I state this is because there’s a confused notion that Marxists think there should be
- An unaccountable Vanguard
- The Vanguard does stuff. At a certain arbitrary point the Vanguard dissolves and society embraces full horizontalism
I’ll address these in order. First, the Vanguard is in no-way meant to be unaccountable, nor a small group of elites, but the most politically active, practiced, and experienced among the proletariat elected by the rest of the proletariat. The concept of the “Mass Line” is crucial to Marxist theory, that is, the insepperability of the Vanguard from the masses. If this line is broken, the Vanguard loses legitimacy and ceases to be effective, whether it falls into Tailism or Commandism. These tendencies must be fought daily, and don’t simply vanish by decree.
Secondly, the basis for Marxian Communism is the developmental trends of Capitalism. Markets start highly decentralized, but gradually the better Capitalists outcompete and grow, and as they grow they must develop new methods of accounting and planning. Capital concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, yet socialization increases as these conglomerations begin to reach monstrous heights and require incredibly complex planning. The development of such methods and tools is the real, scientific foundation of Public Ownership and Central Planning.
Continuing, once the Proletariat takes control and creates a Proletarian State, the Proletariat, the more experienced among them the Vanguard, gradually wrests from the bourgeoisie their Capital with respect to that industries and sectors that have sufficiently developed. This process continues until all Capital has been folded into the Public Sector, at which point laws meant for restraining the bourgeoisie begin to become superfluous and “die out.” The Vanguard doesn’t “dissolve” or “cede power,” but itself as a concept also dies out, as over time new methods of planning and infrastructure make its role more superfluous. Classes in general are abolished once all property is in the Public Sector, and as such the State no longer exists either, as there isn’t a class to oppress.
This is why Marxists say the State “withers away.” It isn’t about demolishing itself, but that Marx and Engels had a particular vision of what the State even is, and why they said it could not be abolished overnight.
Hope that helped! As a side note, asking this on Lemmy.world, an anti-Marxist instance, is only ever going to get you answers biased in that direction. I suggest asking on other instances as well to get a more complete view.
Lemmy.world, an anti-Marxist instance
I wouldn’t call Lemmy.world anti-Marxist. I would say there has definitely been some knee-jerk to the heavy-handed moderation of Lemmy.ml, but being opposed to the more extreme methods of Lemmy.ml doesn’t mean opposition to Marxism in concept. It means you’ll get a broader set of responses since criticism won’t get deleted by the mods/admins, but there are still plenty of leftists on Lemmy.world.
Similar to how opposing Stalinism doesn’t mean one opposes Marxism, you know?
Lemmy.world defederated from the largest explicitly Marxist aligned instances, their thread going over why spells out pretty clearly that opposition to liberalism was the key determining factor in doing so. Lemmy.ml isn’t even a Marxist instance, only admin’d and moderated by Marxists, yet is the instance with undeniably the most conflict with Lemmy.world currently among their federated instances. Moreover, many lemmy.world mods have expressed negative opinions towards Marxism directly, here’s an example.
Lemmy.world is a liberal instance, is admin’d and moderated largely as such, and has taken deliberate measures against Marxism and Marxists. I believe it’s fair to consider Lemmy.world to overall be anti-Marxist. Does that mean no users share Marxist sympathies? No, of course not, but overall the bias is clear. Similarly, by defederating from the larger Marxist-aligned instances, a thread on Lemmy.world is shutting out the viewpoints of most of the Marxists, rather than having a “broad” view, this minimizes the variance in responses.
Just my 2 cents.
I’d agree the MLs aren’t Marxist. I don’t think a Marxist would unironically stan China Russia and north Korea.
On what grounds do you say Marxist-Leninists aren’t Marxists? The world over, the vast majority of Marxists fall under the umbrella of Marxism-Leninism.
Well, first of all, Lenin betrayed the revolution and implemented a new form of Feudalism, not communism. His party lost the 1917 election, and he threw a hissy fit that launched a civil war.
All because he thought that his way was best, so he created a totalitarian dictatorship. And then handed it over to Stalin, who made everything worse.
Marx himself said that communism needed to rise out of capitalist democracy. It cannot rise out of a dictatorship, because dictators never voluntarily give up power.
This is extremely wrong on several accounts, to the point of absurdity in several parts.
First, Lenin did not “betray the revolution.” Lenin and the Bolsheviks carried out the revolution. Had they not had the real support of the working class via the Soviet system implemented prior to the establishment of the USSR, they could not have established Socialism to begin with.
Secondly, Lenin did not “implement a new form of feudalism.” This is utterly divorced from reality. Feudalism is characterized by agrarian peasantry that live on land owned by a feudal lord, till the land, pay rent to said lord, and manufacture for themselves the bulk of their consumption. The Soviet model was that of a Soviet Republic, characterized by Public Ownership and Central Planning, both of which are key aspects of Marxism as conceived by Marx himself, not Lenin.
Third, the election in the liberal bourgeois government. Russia in 1917 had 2 governments, the Soviet Government supported by the Workers and Peasants, and the Provisional Government supported by the Bourgeoisie and Petite Bourgeoisie. The Socialist Revolutionaries won the election in the Constituent Assembly for the bourgeois government, however faith in the bourgeois government was already gone! The Soviet Government toppled the Provisional Government, solidifying itself as the only legitimate government. Lenin did not throw a “hissy fit,” the point of the Constituent Assembly was to show just how detached from the will of the Working Class the bourgeois government was.
Fourth, the notion of the USSR as a “totalitarian dictatorship.” This is false on both accounts. The Soviet Democratic model is well documented, such as by Pat Sloan in his book Soviet Democracy. The Soviet Republic extended democracy to economic production, and was a dramatic improvement for workers over the Tsarist regime and the bourgeois Provisional Government. The USSR was also not a dictatorship, the General Secretary was not a position of absolute control, even the CIA didn’t believe it to be.
Fifth, Marx himself. This is perhaps your most absurd claim. Marx never once said Communism “rises from Capitist Democracy.” Marx was both entirely revolutionary, believing reforming Capitalist society without revolution to be impossible, and similarly did not even believe Capitalism was required for said Communist revolution to take place. Marx believed Markets have a tendency to centralize, laying the foundations for Public Ownership and Central Planning. Even in a Socialist state, markets can and will exist. From Marx:
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Marx believed Capitalism makes Communist revolution inevitable by its own mechanisms, but not that Capitalism is required to perform said revolution! We see with real, practical experience that the Proletariat is the true revolutionary class, but even in countries where the Proletariat make up a minority of the population as compared to the peasantry revolution is still possible. Markets cannot be abolished overnight, but that doesn’t mean it is not a Socialist system.
I seriously recommend you read theory, or revisit it if you’re just rusty. If you want help, I made an introductory Marxist reading list, and I’d love feedback.
You can’t just claim ownership of all communism and claim everyone falls under the ML umbrella, especially when MLs support dictatorial regimes that are antithetical to communism.
I am not “claiming ownership of all Communism,” I am accurately stating that Marxism-Leninism is by far the most common form of Marxism, as it is the basis for the vast majority of AES states past and present. It has real, practical foundations and as such has continued popularity internationally. This is less true in the West, where AES states are violently combatted daily.
I guess there’s a disconnect on what Marx actually thought and what they believe then, as op has pointed out. And the whole Russia China north Korea thing.
So to begin with all communism so far has never been democratically voted in as far as I know and pretty much starts with an ideological military government that then needs to transition back to democracy.
Many do transition to a one party system where all democracy is contained within the party and essentially becomes a “primaries only” type.
Then slowly over time power consolidations and purges bring it towards a dictatorship because there are no checks and balances against it.
So it seems to me that the only way to get to the ideological communism is through democracy and constitutional changes, proportional representation and coalition governments that don’t allow any one toxic pernon to consolidate power.
Well communism has never been achieved, so the name is always aspirational.
But aside from that split hair, you might be interested in reading about communism in India:
“The Communist Party in Kerala has functioned under the conditions of a liberal democracy, relying on success in multi-party elections to remain in power. CPI’s 1957 constitution stated it would allow the existence of opposing parties after it had a parliamentary majority.”
I stand corrected, that’s an excellent case of socialism working that was democratically elected in a multi party system. I didn’t know one existed! Thanks for sharing. It also has some really good numbers for a state in India.
Here’s a paragraph from Wikipedia page on Kerala for everyone else that didn’t know about it.
Kerala has the lowest positive population growth rate in India, 3.44%; the highest Human Development Index (HDI), 0.784 in 2018 (0.712 in 2015); the highest literacy rate, 96.2% in the 2018 literacy survey conducted by the National Statistical Office, India;[11] the highest life expectancy, 77.3 years; and the highest sex ratio, 1,084 women per 1,000 men. Kerala is the least impoverished state in India according to NITI Aayog’s Sustainable Development Goals dashboard and Reserve Bank of India’s Handbook of Statistics on Indian Economy.[22][23] Kerala is the second-most urbanised major state in the country with 47.7% urban population according to the 2011 Census of India.[24] The state topped in the country to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals according to the annual report of NITI Aayog published in 2019.[25] The state has the highest media exposure in India with newspapers publishing in nine languages, mainly Malayalam and sometimes English. Hinduism is practised by more than half of the population, followed by Islam and Christianity.
It’s the opportunist problem. We see this throughout rebellions in history, not just when communist countries are made. Basically, anytime conditions are bad enough for the people to demand change it’s really easy for someone to trade on their ignorance. They can push policies that sound like they’ll help but really consolidate power. And if anyone speaks up, they’re an enemy of the people.
For a non Communist example of this in modern history check out the French Revolution.
The Paris Commune is a great example of the class war being brutally engaged by the bourgeois.
Check USA right now.
Yup. And I’ve spent the last decade and a half telling people the working class isn’t going to take it anymore.
Because it is a dictatorship.
A dictatorship of the proletariat.
For real though we’ve not seen communism yet.
Because it was spread by a totalitarian communist dictatorship. if the USSR were democratic , they wouldve spread democracy.
In modern communist societies the government has an insane amount of power and control over just about everything. This power and control attracts a certain type of person who thirsts for power and control. People usually develop a bloodthirsty desire for power and control due to underlying psychological issues. These issues influence the person to think they ALWAYS need more power (think anorexic person who weighs 95lbs but still insists they are overweight).
It’s a human nature problem imo.
