05-21-2013, 06:02 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-21-2013, 09:07 AM by FireIceTalon.)
As promised, a reply. Hopefully this clears up some misconceptions.
There is no material evidence to suggest that the Paris Commune would have suffered from corruption that resulted in later revolutions - because it was a genuine 'dictatorship of the proletarian', where the workers themselves made the rules and elected people who they saw fit to solve any disputes (officials who could be recalled at any time if they clearly started making decisions that were antithetical to the interests of the commune). It didn't have the political elitism or centralized authority that developed in the Russian Revolution and the examples that followed it, because there was no Vanguard party. Vanguardism was developed by Lenin because he disagreed with Marx and Engels in their thoughts that workers could achieve 'class consciousness' - for Lenin workers were only capable of obtaining 'trade union consciousness'. He was very influenced by the Blanquists (though Lenin was still a Marxist to be sure, since he at least in theory, viewed the workers as the important class for change, and he also agreed with the materialist conception of history that is inherent to Marxism). Admittedly, sometimes when I see all the extreme false consciousness around me, or when I see people call Obama a Marxist, or people saying that we are already living under socialism and that it is the cause for the global economic mess, sometimes I have to wonder if Lenin was indeed right in his elitist view towards workers. Maybe he was, who knows, but either way I can't bring myself to advocate a Vanguardist model for revolution for that very reason: it's extremely elitist. Blanquism and any form of 'elitistism' (socialist or not) or otherwise authoritarian currents undermine the very essence of what it means to be a communist.
Vanguardism is unique to Leninist and its off-spring interpretations of Marxism, and misinformed people like Shoju seem to think that all Marxists are automatically Leninist, Stalinist, and so on (although many Leninists are also anti-Stalinist, but that is another topic altogether that isn't important to my points here). Nothing could be farther from the truth, as you yourself admitted a couple posts back. The leaders of communist parties do NOT, by any means, speak for every communist out there - far from it. Most Marxists in fact, oppose the idea of a Vanguard Party, and even during the Russian Revolution many prominent Marxists were very critical of Bolshevism (even those who DID support the revolution). But demonizing Marxism is in the interests of the bourgeois, because it provides an objective and scientific analysis of the 'economic laws of motion' under capitalism that are extremely inconvenient to the justification or notion of capitalism being the best possible system - so conflating it with Stalinism and painting all Marxists with a broad brush as being blood thirsty dictators does wonders to cloud peoples perception of socialism (or Marxism for that matter). I'm a blood thirsty dictator that wants to control or kill all of you (sarcasm, btw). Thankfully, there are people, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, that see through this smoke and can call bullshit when such intellectual dishonesty takes place. Not only is it intellectually dishonest, but it also fails to separate the different aspects of Marxism itself - Marxism as a socio-political worldview (the materialist conception of history, revolutionary politics, class struggle, etc) and Marxian economics (dialectical analysis of economic systems and the social relationships which result under them, including alienation, divisions of labor, the concept of surplus value, wage labor, commodity fetishism, labor theory of value, etc). It comes as no surprise that many realms in contemporary academia assign The Communist Manifesto to be read, but very rarely are any sections or passages of Das Capital assigned, and there is a very good reason for this - because the latter is the foundation to understanding the former (Yes, the Manifesto was written first, but this hardly matters). It is Capital, and not the Manifesto, that people should look to first when wanting to understand both Marxism as a systemic mode of analysis and for understanding the groundwork for Marxism as a form of revolutionary political thought.
As I said before, distinguishing between 'communism' and 'Rule of and by the communist party' is important, because they are not the same thing, and to say otherwise is to say State ownership of the means of production within industries is the same thing as public ownership of the means of production - they are very clearly not the same thing. Stalinists and Maoists advocate the former, almost every other stripe of Marxist advocates the latter. The USSR and other countries we call 'communist' were never communist - they merely featured a top-down regime that called themselves The Communist Party. State control of resources and the means of production is still capitalism, just as the so-called mixed economies of Western Europe and social-democracies of Scandinavian countries are NOT mixed-economies (there is no such thing as a "mixed" economy, in fact) - they are still capitalist, just with bigger welfare states that dehumanize the working class in a different way (sorry, Eppie) than state-capitalist regimes like China/former USSR or liberal capitalist countries like the US. Of course, whether these various "communist" parties genuinely wanted to build socialism and thought they were acting in the interests of the workers or not is another matter to analyze and debate, but calling the countries communist is fundamentally incorrect due to what I said at the beginning of this paragraph. Anyways, needless to say, the concept of the Vanguard in my opinion, goes against or defeats the whole purpose of socialism. Thus, I am not a Marxist-Leninist, and I strongly disagree with the central tenets of his (Lenin's) theories, even if it is my personal belief that he meant well and he made some brilliant contributions to both communist theory and to understanding the development of capitalism.
Lastly, as far as people never being as good as we think we are, I have to kindly disagree. I mean, we aren't perfect by any means, but nor are we the savages that most bourgeois think tanks and institutions tell us that we are. We are quite rational, and in general, for the most part, we are good beings naturally. But we are also heavily influenced by our environmental conditions, and it will reflect in our actions, thoughts, and behavior. Capitalism is an extremely irrational system on almost every level, thus people seem, and perhaps are, irrational as a result. The only way to change that is to change the mode of production, which will result in a different set of social relationships that fundamentally change these things (if over time) about our nature. To suggest that the very goal of socialism is utopian doesn't provide any materialist explanation or meaningful argument of whether such a future is possible or not, and in fact Marx was highly critical of the 'utopian socialists' before him for that very reason, cause they had no scientific understanding of how capitalism works. There was a time when people thought the world was flat and that human beings walking on the moon could never happen, and of course, they were wrong.
There is no material evidence to suggest that the Paris Commune would have suffered from corruption that resulted in later revolutions - because it was a genuine 'dictatorship of the proletarian', where the workers themselves made the rules and elected people who they saw fit to solve any disputes (officials who could be recalled at any time if they clearly started making decisions that were antithetical to the interests of the commune). It didn't have the political elitism or centralized authority that developed in the Russian Revolution and the examples that followed it, because there was no Vanguard party. Vanguardism was developed by Lenin because he disagreed with Marx and Engels in their thoughts that workers could achieve 'class consciousness' - for Lenin workers were only capable of obtaining 'trade union consciousness'. He was very influenced by the Blanquists (though Lenin was still a Marxist to be sure, since he at least in theory, viewed the workers as the important class for change, and he also agreed with the materialist conception of history that is inherent to Marxism). Admittedly, sometimes when I see all the extreme false consciousness around me, or when I see people call Obama a Marxist, or people saying that we are already living under socialism and that it is the cause for the global economic mess, sometimes I have to wonder if Lenin was indeed right in his elitist view towards workers. Maybe he was, who knows, but either way I can't bring myself to advocate a Vanguardist model for revolution for that very reason: it's extremely elitist. Blanquism and any form of 'elitistism' (socialist or not) or otherwise authoritarian currents undermine the very essence of what it means to be a communist.
Vanguardism is unique to Leninist and its off-spring interpretations of Marxism, and misinformed people like Shoju seem to think that all Marxists are automatically Leninist, Stalinist, and so on (although many Leninists are also anti-Stalinist, but that is another topic altogether that isn't important to my points here). Nothing could be farther from the truth, as you yourself admitted a couple posts back. The leaders of communist parties do NOT, by any means, speak for every communist out there - far from it. Most Marxists in fact, oppose the idea of a Vanguard Party, and even during the Russian Revolution many prominent Marxists were very critical of Bolshevism (even those who DID support the revolution). But demonizing Marxism is in the interests of the bourgeois, because it provides an objective and scientific analysis of the 'economic laws of motion' under capitalism that are extremely inconvenient to the justification or notion of capitalism being the best possible system - so conflating it with Stalinism and painting all Marxists with a broad brush as being blood thirsty dictators does wonders to cloud peoples perception of socialism (or Marxism for that matter). I'm a blood thirsty dictator that wants to control or kill all of you (sarcasm, btw). Thankfully, there are people, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, that see through this smoke and can call bullshit when such intellectual dishonesty takes place. Not only is it intellectually dishonest, but it also fails to separate the different aspects of Marxism itself - Marxism as a socio-political worldview (the materialist conception of history, revolutionary politics, class struggle, etc) and Marxian economics (dialectical analysis of economic systems and the social relationships which result under them, including alienation, divisions of labor, the concept of surplus value, wage labor, commodity fetishism, labor theory of value, etc). It comes as no surprise that many realms in contemporary academia assign The Communist Manifesto to be read, but very rarely are any sections or passages of Das Capital assigned, and there is a very good reason for this - because the latter is the foundation to understanding the former (Yes, the Manifesto was written first, but this hardly matters). It is Capital, and not the Manifesto, that people should look to first when wanting to understand both Marxism as a systemic mode of analysis and for understanding the groundwork for Marxism as a form of revolutionary political thought.
As I said before, distinguishing between 'communism' and 'Rule of and by the communist party' is important, because they are not the same thing, and to say otherwise is to say State ownership of the means of production within industries is the same thing as public ownership of the means of production - they are very clearly not the same thing. Stalinists and Maoists advocate the former, almost every other stripe of Marxist advocates the latter. The USSR and other countries we call 'communist' were never communist - they merely featured a top-down regime that called themselves The Communist Party. State control of resources and the means of production is still capitalism, just as the so-called mixed economies of Western Europe and social-democracies of Scandinavian countries are NOT mixed-economies (there is no such thing as a "mixed" economy, in fact) - they are still capitalist, just with bigger welfare states that dehumanize the working class in a different way (sorry, Eppie) than state-capitalist regimes like China/former USSR or liberal capitalist countries like the US. Of course, whether these various "communist" parties genuinely wanted to build socialism and thought they were acting in the interests of the workers or not is another matter to analyze and debate, but calling the countries communist is fundamentally incorrect due to what I said at the beginning of this paragraph. Anyways, needless to say, the concept of the Vanguard in my opinion, goes against or defeats the whole purpose of socialism. Thus, I am not a Marxist-Leninist, and I strongly disagree with the central tenets of his (Lenin's) theories, even if it is my personal belief that he meant well and he made some brilliant contributions to both communist theory and to understanding the development of capitalism.
Lastly, as far as people never being as good as we think we are, I have to kindly disagree. I mean, we aren't perfect by any means, but nor are we the savages that most bourgeois think tanks and institutions tell us that we are. We are quite rational, and in general, for the most part, we are good beings naturally. But we are also heavily influenced by our environmental conditions, and it will reflect in our actions, thoughts, and behavior. Capitalism is an extremely irrational system on almost every level, thus people seem, and perhaps are, irrational as a result. The only way to change that is to change the mode of production, which will result in a different set of social relationships that fundamentally change these things (if over time) about our nature. To suggest that the very goal of socialism is utopian doesn't provide any materialist explanation or meaningful argument of whether such a future is possible or not, and in fact Marx was highly critical of the 'utopian socialists' before him for that very reason, cause they had no scientific understanding of how capitalism works. There was a time when people thought the world was flat and that human beings walking on the moon could never happen, and of course, they were wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/user/FireIceTalon
"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of the existence of your class." - Marx (addressing the bourgeois)
"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of the existence of your class." - Marx (addressing the bourgeois)