Relevant rant:
📺 Why the Democratic Party CANNOT and WILL NOT be Reformed
Democrats would rather lose to a Republican, to a conservative, to a fascist, to Trump, than address the material conditions of the American people.
Relevant rant:
📺 Why the Democratic Party CANNOT and WILL NOT be Reformed
Democrats would rather lose to a Republican, to a conservative, to a fascist, to Trump, than address the material conditions of the American people.
The fact that liberals refuse to read just 100 pages of State and Revolution while insisting that they are having new ideas or that the political environment has somehow changed is by far the most frustrating thing about Lemmy comment sections. I’m an anarchist, someone smeared by Lenin in that book but at least I read it and understand. My disagreement is with the vision and form of the dictatorship of the proletariat and how we can build a new commune, not the need for revolution or insisting that somehow, some way after 175 years of the same discussion voting for reform will work.
I swear Americans have never read a book that wasn’t Harry Potter in their lives.
Nonsense. Some of them have read The Bible.
fewer than the ones who said they have.
Many current elected officials also are huge fans of Austrian autobiographies
Also Catcher in the Rye, though maybe that’s a better example for reasons Americans shouldn’t read books. Probably could’ve gotten a few more years out of Lennon.
As a coming-of-age book, particularly for American teenagers, “Catcher in the Rye” resonates for a reason. It does an excellent job of capturing the moment from a sympathetic point of view. And then you read it ten years later, thinking to yourself “Holy shit was I really like this?” only to realize you absolutely were.
Ironically, most of the self described devotees have not.
That’s not true, they’ve also read 1984 and thought all “adult” books are gonna be this fucking dreadful and boring so they don’t read anymore, they just pretend
idiocracy was a documentary1984 is like, so true, manftfy lol
I gotta say, 1984 has a lot wrong with it. But it’s pretty short and punchy as books go. Espionage, sex, torture, murder. Orwell was Tom Clancy before Tom Clancy was cool.
If you’re looking for something that’s endless, dreadful, and boring, you might want a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
It’s short, but not punchy. It’s a
hundred pages of diatribes, some misogyny, a story beat, another fifty pages raving about bureaucracy, a story beat, and 100 pages about brainwashing and how socialism fucking sucks. Then the most half-baked “how do I tie this bad essay together?” ending.
It’s Atlas Shrugged for people who do take showers.
The joke of 1984 is that Orwell neatly described the modern capitalist British State virtually to a T. Hell, it wasn’t all that far off from the contemporary British State, given the conditions of paranoia and economic decline the island suffered during the postwar aftermath.
In the era it was written, a lot of the diatribes about the nefarious villains of socialist politics felt like a guy throwing on a big spooky ghost custom with a light under the chin. But in the modern moment… fuck it if cops busting down my door because my elementary-school son was tricked into accusing me of ThoughtCrime during a mandatory Two-Minute Hate doesn’t feel like a thing that could really happen.
The execution was a forced ending. But the psychology at the end - this desperate liberalist clinging to an individualized, compartmentalized psychic resistance - absolutely strikes a cord. I know plenty of people (hell, I regularly indict myself) over the reflexive meekness draped atop rebellious fantasy. This growling whipped-dog sentiment, where liberals will say everything in a loud whisper, but duck their heads in terror at the first whiff of authority or consequence… as we move further and further towards fascism. I see it everywhere.
Orwell very neatly diagnoses the failure of the liberal opposition in the personage of Winston Smith and his peers. And it is even further pronounced in the meta-textual narrative, as Orwell himself is an embodiment of Winston. A man who has rewritten history at the behest of his imperialist paymasters (after a career as a fucking Burmese cop and nark, ffs) goes to his grave subsuming the revulsion of his own country with a fear and antipathy towards a distant foreign land.
I do agree with your points. I think it’s certainly an insightful book (just not in the way Orwell intended) but certainly not a good book.
Not true. Some of them use it as an instruction manual.
I’m curious to hear the objections and alteratives. I’m not fully versed in anarchist thought.
Essentially that there is no way that the dictatorship of the proletarian will ever be temporary and that even though he spends time talking about the evils of the bourgeois state and how it must be dismantled this dictatorship with its “vanguard” (which are just new elites) will necessarily form a new state that will also form self-preservation methods and never transfer to a workers run stateless system. Bakunin calls them a red bureaucracy and Emma Goldman writes about how the Bolshevik state simply replaced the old Tsarist state and became reformist and bourgeois in nature losing its revolutionary character in time. The crackdown of the Kronstadt rebellion was the first seeds of this nearly immediately after the October revolution. The anarchist response and alternative to the centralized state that Lenin believes is required is a decentralized system of worker self-management pods in federated councils and communes, not a top-down elite vanguard run dictatorship.
A lot of the disagreement comes from the understanding and lessons learned from the Paris commune. Lenin believes this is a prototype of a worker’s state with recallable delegates, less red tape/bureaucracy and the removal of the existing state but Anarchists don’t believe the lesson here is to just create another state, although I personally would argue a dictatorship of the proletariat is preferable to the dictatorship of capital we currently live in, we want more communes that work together. We don’t believe the revolutionary character of the commune went far enough to actually destroy the existing state and instead tried to recreate it on a smaller scale.
I think you’re erasing the economic component of the Marxist position, as well as conflating the nature of the state, which Marxists and Anarchists somewhat disagree on. Marxist communism, in its stateless form, is still fully centralized and planned, but also classless. It isn’t about “transferring to the workers,” that basis is the means by which to bring about communism. The millitarization of the state is necessary until the world is socialist and all class contradictions have been resolved, but there will still be administrative positions well into communism.
Anarchism is indeed more decentralized, but this is a departure from the Marxist understanding of economic development. The real argument is not based on how to get to the final stage, but what that final stage even looks like to begin with. Full horizontalism a la anarchism, or a one world collectivized and planned a la Marxism.
I do support anarchists generally, certainly over capitalists, but I think a lot of confusion is drawn between anarchists and Marxists due to having different stances on terms and what they look like in practice.
In Lenin’s writing in State and Revolution it is absolutely is about transferring the mechanism of the state to the workers who then form a militarized proletarian “temporary” state to destroy the other classes. That is what the dictatorship of the proletariat is, a transfer of power from the Bourgois and capital class to the working class who then destroy the other classes to create a classless system. I don’t think this is possible and that is the crux of the disagreement.
What you just said isn’t at odds with what I said. The state is a system that resolves class contradictions through class oppression, in socialism that state resolves them in favor of the proletariat. It isn’t a distinct class. The “special bodies of armed men” Lenin speaks of, ie the millitant organizations, are there to protect from invaders and to keep the bourgeoisie, as long as it still exists, in check.
As the economy grows and develops, the class contradictions must be resolved. The job of the state in socialism is to keep the proletariat in power, and gradually sublimate private property until it’s fully centralized, globally, at which point there is no bourgeosie nor proletariat. Administration doesn’t cease to exist, but millitant policing and armies that retain state power have no reason to exist when there’s no class conflict to be reconciled.
Bukharin explains the difference between the Marxist and anarchist position here, though do be warned, it’s highly sectarian (as this matter inevitably becomes, as it’s the core argument between Marxists and anarchists):
So, in essence, the Marxist conception of communism is founded on centralization and organization, while the anarchist conception is based on decentralization and the elimination of any and all hierarchy. I am sympathetic to the anarchist position in that I used to be one, but over time have come to become a Marxist-Leninist. As a consequence, I find a lot of conflict between Marxists and anarchists is largely due to differences in analysis of what the state even consists of, and righting those misconceptions of the other helps productive dialogue on the left.
This is wrong, Lenin in State and Revolution precisely points out that this was Kautsky view of the state. The state is not a reconciliatory tool, it is a tool for a class to dominate the others. When we talk about a dictatorship of the proletariat we talk about seizing the state and use it to oppress the capitalist class not to reconciliate. Make the capitalist serve their historical mission of organizing and developing the productive forces but strip them off all political power.
Another thing i would like to point out is about the withering of the state. It should be understood that the state as a tool for organizing production, is not going away, but the state as a tool of class oppression is what is going to wither away.
I’ll be honest, I completely fucked up the wording there. Rather than “reconcile,” I meant resolve, as in when the bourgeoisie comes into conflict with the proletariat, the state will resolve it in favor of the proletariat through class oppression, hence why I said it would resolve them in favor of the proletariat. Thanks for pointing it out, I’m not a Kaustkyite I assure you.
As far as your second paragraph, I’m in full agreement. What Engels calls the “Administration of Things” cannot be anything but an organized society, and that implies government, but with private property sublimated it will no longer have any class character and the state as such will no longer exist, as it cannot resolve class contradictions that no longer exist.
I’ll correct my wording!
(No source?)
Anarchy and Scientific Communism, sorry!
I’ve gone the other way with my thinking from pretty hard line Maoist to Anarchist in my middle age. I think your response is good for anarchists who are stuck in the theory of people who are long dead but not really my personal thinking and understanding, including living through a war, which I added towards the end.
I don’t believe that the goals dictatorship of the proletariat is actually possible. I don’t think that it will ever work and exists firmly in the imagination of thinkers from 100 years ago. I’m not an anarchist in the Bukharin sense, I’m an anarchist in the sense that I desire a way of life for all animals, including humans, that is anti hierarchical but simply do not believe these contradictions are resolvable in a knowable way. I believe that the future classless government-less system is desirable but that the pathway is not clear without Leto II-esque prescience thinking. If we get there from a MLM sense or some other sense matters not to me.
Honestly, I see a lot of overlap between Maoism and anarchism, so that’s not that big of a stretch if you ask me. I also am not opposed to hierarchy or government, humanity’s strengths lie in its ability to organize, and the progressive elements of capitalism like the socialization of production should be mastered so that we can have a more just, scientifically driven society based on common ownership and planning.
As far as the here and now, I think the PRC is doing it best, and is charting that course at the forefront. It has a long way to go before we can reach communism, but the path forward already exists.
Dude what fucking planet are you living on?
I wish it wasn’t the same one as you
What do you mean? The State and Revolution is a phenomenal booklet.
It’s short, it’s incredibly concise, it doesn’t use needless academicisms, and it’s surprisingly very funny. It’s probably the best value-to-volume ratio of any political text imo.
Oh, that’s a tough one! Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is definitely a top contender, but Lenin is clearer. Maybe Foundations of Leninism? Either way, I 100% agree, State and Revolution is a must read.