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.
Is it more democratic to have a rotating cast of circus clowns, each blaming their predecessor for the current problems and passing the buck to the next while shuffling off before there’s even a semblance of accountability for their actions?
Who comprises the vanguard? Bro’s talking about Narodnism, not vanguardism but he doesn’t even know it.
#3 is pure, uncut idealism. Zubok’s book Collapse details the causes of the systematic and intentional dismantling of the USSR (Audiobook here). There’s no reason why people couldn’t have been sold this incremental undermining of the USSR through referenda and other democratic processes.