My roommate has been educating himself on communism, and we have been having many great conversations on theory and what have you. He says he is a communist. However, he has come to some very different conclusions to me, and I have been going back and forth on his talking points a lot. I was wondering what you guys would think of his talking points since I have to hear them and discuss them with him a lot.
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Vanguardism/council republics are inherently flawed and undemocratic. He admits that there is democracy within a Marxist-Leninist government, but says it is not good enough because you don’t vote directly for the president, etc…
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Says that vanguardism is “elitist” and that the core of the idea is that the working classes are stupid and only the intelligentsia knows right. He said he liked Lenin but he was too “mean” and didn’t speak as kindly of the peasants as he wanted. (lol)
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Attributes the fall of the USSR entirely to the democratic organization of the government. Says that if the Soviet Union had allowed a more “libertarian” “democratic” structure what happened wouldn’t have happened. I’ve also notice he attributes a lot of China’s problems historically to the way their government is structured.
This is the stage where he needs to read an in-depth study of any revolution. His theory has to be tested against the challenges real-world revolutionaries faced.
Imo the Russian revolution is the best one to study but it’s more important that the source is good. Losurdo’s Stalin is a good read. Proles Pod is in the process of a multi part series as well.
Rather than try to directly refute years of ingrained propaganda, start the process of building a better foundational understanding. The misinfo will be slowly abandoned when it starts to contradict his more complex network of knowledge.
I wish I knew how to tell bro he’s an idealist and has brain worms in real life person language. He says revolutionary governments should work to oppress the bourgeoisie, but if the vanguard party isn’t abolished/dissolved/weakened within a certain amount of time its “authoritarian”. I keep trying to address external pressures on these entities and what I feel like is a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept by him, but it’s to no avail.
Ultimately it’s not a matter of him coming to the “right” conclusion, it’s whether he can answer the questions posed by material conditions. So rather than saying his conclusions are wrong, describe some of the problems the USSR faced and ask how he would have dealt with them. Both of the sources I mentioned go through this in detail, I strongly recommend them to everyone.
Of course of course and you are correct. I’m just yappin’. This is the only dude I talk to basically.
This doesn’t work because all of your revolutions also failed. The USSR fell. The CCP liberalized.
They achieved massive improvement for the society worldwide, so worth it.
Regardless of your opinion on the outcomes, I don’t understand how studying these revolutions “doesn’t work”. Should we dismiss the French revolution with no investigation?
Both the Russian and Chinese revolutions succeeded in seizing the state, defeating the armies of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, and surviving their attempts at sabotage and terrorism. How did they do so? What can we learn from these decisions? What might we have to do differently with our different circumstances?
If you think the revolutions failed, what caused them to fail, and what specifically should the parties have done differently? And we need concrete answers to the real problems they were trying to solve, not idealist hand waving.
The communist revolution in China did not “fail” and the nation has not become less socialist due to its reforms; you are blinded by aesthetics and you do not understand Marxism. Opening up the economy was a move by the CPC that reflected a proper understanding of the subjective nature of socialist construction and corrected Mao’s systematic fatalism/mechanism.