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.
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.