Submitted by __deleted_____ in Socialism

I think all the Marxist-Leninists here will agree that communist experiments always fall apart when revisionists rise up in the ranks and take over the party. Khrushchev and Deng Xiaoping brought on the collapse of attempted communist societies in the USSR and PRC, respectively.

So if revisionism is to blame for these repeated failures, when do we realize that the one-party system will always be corrupted by power seekers?

Libsocs often blame parallelism for the failures of all the previous attempts at communism.

If centralized, one-party systems always result in corruption and eventual dismantlement - it's logical to blame the failures on the lack of opposition in the totalitarian political climate.

On the other hand, a decentralized, direct democracy with a horizontal hierarchy would be nearly impossible for one power-hungry official to destroy.

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BlackFlagged wrote (edited )

Lenin actually handed most businesses (excluding mass industry) back into private hands with his New Economic Policy, so the whole 'the revolution was destroyed by later revisionists' is a fallacy - it simply was never a communist revolution.

Nobody within the party (including Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin) ever claimed that the USSR had achieved communism, so there's no way for something that hadn't ever been communism to be destroyed by 'revisionists'. It was state capitalism and eventually morphed into oligarchy.

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Mullvaden wrote

Spot on. When Trotsky struck down the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921, the revolution was dead right there.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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theblackcat wrote

Stalin was no kind of communist, so any argument that starts "but stalin..." is gonna fall flat. They're trying to establish that the USSR didn't try to be communist even under Lenin - that it wasn't communist under Stalin is a forgone conclusion.

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marsxyz wrote

to be honest, little businesses aren't really capitalistic. A good bunch of them work exactly as they were cooperatives but only with one or two people in it. Nothing to do witth mass exploitation.

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mofongo wrote

Little bussinesses are capitalism's original form.

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marsxyz wrote

Thats kinda not true. Capitalism original form is merchant. Slave owner and all merchant being rich because of mass exploitation in america.

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theblackcat wrote

Since the people running some of them were making way more than workers, I'm not sure how it wasn't capitalistic

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marsxyz wrote

I am speaking about self employed people and so on. You can't say an uber driver or a little farmer is a boss exploiting people.

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SpiritOfTito wrote

Have a look at some of the democratic socialists that came to power in the 20th century:

Chile's Allende was a democratic socialist who won every election fair and square and was murdered in his presidential palace by the US air strikes

Italys communist party created a united front with the socialists and overwhelmingly won a majority in 1946 elections. Again they did it by the book and through parliamentary process. The result? The yankees collaborated with the Christian Democrats who were a collection of collaborators, monarchists and plain unreconstructed fascists to oust every communist from their seat.

France, also heavily dependant on US financial aid, ousted all its communist ministers as well.

For a full breakdown of the shady shit the US did in the 1948 elections in Italy read here

https://williamblum.org/chapters/killing-hope/italyhere

Once you square the circle of horizontal democratic governments being outright murdered by the US or simply using every tool at their disposal and endless amounts of monopoly finance capital to propagandise, buy up, usurp and corrupt every facet of public life let me know.

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__deleted_____ OP wrote (edited )

Once you square the circle

Don't be arrogant. I'm perfectly aware that the US destroys communism wherever it appears, that has nothing to do with this. "The US sucks" is your go response whenever anyone is critical of the USSR.

The fact of the matter is, whatever the US did or would have done, the USSR wasn't communist and wasn't trying to be communist, so it's irrelevant.

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SpiritOfTito wrote (edited )

Did I say it was?

"The US sucks" is your go response whenever anyone is critical of the USS

Cos it does. Its literally oppressed human kind for centuries. First in the form of colonial genocide, then of slavery, then imperialism, then anti socialism, then as pro apartheid in every apartheid society thats existed and finally as the biggest polluter the earth has ever know

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justice wrote

Wait - that wasn’t ShadowResidue’s point. We should always remain critically minded in every direction, no? That one country’s practices are terrible doesn’t negate the faults of another.

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SpiritOfTito wrote

You missed my point: How are you going to implement locally owned democratically controlled form of government that has full control of the productive services - without being murdered by the US?

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justice wrote (edited )

Ah, sorry. Did not mean to speak for you (and incorrectly at that).

That’s an extremely important point, of course. And I will have to admit that at the moment I remain ignorant as to much of contemporary history (that’s my embarrassment; I’m in the middle of some intensive self-education), but are there literally no examples of this? What about the Zapatista?

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EdgyIndividualistBuffoon wrote (edited )

Russia in 1917 was a largely peasant agrarian economy with massive corruption problems, widespread shortages and very little modern industry. It was frankly extremely remarkable how they managed to industrialize so quickly and put the first satellite into space just 40 years later. Obviously, central planning hits hard limits when you get to middle incomes, but it seemed to work astonishingly well for a time. American politicians and economists were also very afraid up until around the 1960s.

Like it's absolutely delusional to discard the economic and technological achievements of the early Soviet Union, even if you think (as I do) that they were based on oppression, murder, and environmental destruction to a large degree. That was not something other countries in their position managed to do, even if they had their own murder and oppression (and they mostly did).

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote (edited )

I appreciate this post and its responses. I don't know about these things so it's good to read!

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