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 a pretty normal route of radicalization. Libertarian socialism definitely jives more with the propaganda that Americans grew up with. My path was libertarian -> Bernie lib / socdem -> anarchist -> Marxist / ml. What got me was basically reading about the success rates of anarchism vs MLism, honestly I still feel like anarchism/libsoc aligns with my ideals more than MLism. But unfortunately it just can’t really defend itself like ML revolutions can
This is me exactly lmao.
I vibe with this. I don’t think the planet has time for us to wait to get it right first try and achieve anarcho-communism before we achieve more hierarchical forms.