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Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 25th 2025 at 9:51:19 AM
Trotsky and Stalin both built their ideologies on top of Lenin’s concepts and what we’d today call Leninism, so they inherited all of the problem of Leninism (which is basically all the top-down authoritarian dictatorship crap).
Lenin however also killed a bunch of people off after the first revolution, so while its clear that Stalin or Trotsky you still get dictatorship, no communist state has ever really tried going down a non-Leninist path.
The Bolsheviks weren't the only revolutionaries against the Russian government, I don’t think we’ve ever seen a communist state that draws from anything but a Bolshevik background.
The closest attempt was probably the Ukrainian anarchist territory Makhnovia, it lasted three years before fighting first the White Army and then the inevitable betrayal by the Red Army saw it destroyed.
Nepal by the way does have a ruling communist party that is committed to the existence of a multi-party democracy, they might well be the only democratic-communists in government in the world.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThis is, as always, a flawed argument for several reasons, for example only one route to Communism has been really tried in large complex countries, and that route is fundamentally flawed. So really instead of failing multiple times you numerous examples of it failing for much the same reason. And there have always been Communists arguing that that way is dumb and they should try another way, but they were brushed aside for the past century because hey Lenin's way worked. Until it didn't. And now finally the other voices are getting heard now that we've moved far enough away from the Cold War.
I also need to point out that Capitalism didn't exactly breeze into existence without a hitch, history is littered with failed Capitalist states, but the bar seems to be set much lower there for some reason. Capitalism also had barely any academic or philosophical grounding before it kicked off (while Socialism has an absolute metric shitton) but they went and did it anyway.
So, please, try and get some better reasons - this isn't a very good one. It's quite ahistorical and shows obvious ideological bias - and/or an understanding of Socialism/Communism that ignores anything that isn't Leninism.
My caveat to this is Communism sometimes does only mean the dumb authoritarian-vanguard bullshit - this was how the Revolutionary and Reformist Socialists split after the October Revolution, the Revolutionaries called themselves Communists to distance themselves from the "Socialists" - who largely went on to become the Social Democratic parties of Europe. If your opposition to Communism is solely towards the Vanguard > Take the State > State Capitalism > Redistribution of Capital and MOP, then yeah that doesn't work. It is the failson of Leftist thought.
However, Communist also means anyone who wants to aim for the eventual classless, stateless society envisioned by Marx where the principles of Enlightenment thought - Liberté, égalité, fraternité - are truly realised (one of the main Marxist critiques of Liberalism and Capitalism is that it never really achieved these goals). Communism under this metric (also called Socialism here because Marx never really made any distinction between the two), and this definition is quite widely used tbf, will apply to a far broader group than just Leninist and Leninist-derived Tankie LARPers, and could include everyone from DemSocs who want to get there through reform all the way to the Revolutionary Anarchists who don't believe in instigating a revolution but believe that a popular revolution will inevitably happen at some point because of Capitalism's internal pressures and would rather be prepared to en sure it doesn't go in the direction of Fascism when that happens. And the aforementioned Tankie dipshits are included as well, though many of the rest of us do make sure to shit upon them from great height at any and all available opportunities.
And somehow I think your opposition to Communism is to all of it, not just the Tankie stuff. Cause if it's just the Tankies, then yes - I hope they stay forever in the dustbin of history. But if it's an opposition to broader Socialism/Communism, then no. Most of that shit hasn't been tried out even nearly enough to make such concrete statements as "It just doesn't work".
"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."If more Communist and/or Socialist states proved to be successful, there might be an argument for it. But so far, that hasn't really been the case for the most part.
Heck, the last time people pointed to a nation as a supposed successful model for socialism, that was Venezuela. So yeah...
Edited by M84 on Apr 21st 2020 at 5:46:15 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedWhich yes the USSR may be called a large and complex country, far from all the Warsaw Pact countries or even the countries still working with Communism (or struggling to work with it, to be more accurate) can be described so.
You made your argument and that's never a waste. The issue is that people still disagree with it as the primary issue is communism may genuinely not be a plan but a goal.
And that not only is it impossible to get there but it may not even be desirable.
"It's never been successfully tried" is a decent argument but it's also dismissive to an extent as the issue is not that they were dictators but that they were sincere believers and yet did continually stray into violent authoritarianism. Is it wrong to speculate that may be an inherent flaw in the ideology? Or that specific elements of the ideology won't work?
Any ideology must, for me, begin to be questioned not by what could go right but what could go wrong.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 21st 2020 at 3:38:34 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.That is communism by definition.
Also wow, it's almost like the post was "obviously the approach taken by the Bolsheviks and enforced by the USSR doesn't work" and you jumped straight to... the satellites of the USSR, which are already included in that specific method, and said "See, ALL COMMUNISM".
Edited by RainehDaze on Apr 21st 2020 at 2:12:43 PM
It’s not even that it hasn’t been successfully tried, it’s that non-Leninist communism hasn’t been tried at a state level since Lenin has the original people trying it shot.
There is however a decent argument that all discussions of non-Leninist state-Communism are nothing more than a thought experiment, because no state is willing to try it and no state has major groups within it calling for it to be tried.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran@Raineh Daze: I apologize I only wished to point out the size of the state doesn't seem to be a factor, it's more that it's state level at all.
Heck, hierarchies are even a thing in some animals. Where do you think we got "pecking order" from? Heck, it's a key part of what makes some animals easier to domesticate than others. We humans simply establish ourselves as the top of the animals' hierarchy. Instead of ,say, a chicken being Top Chicken, we are Top Chicken.
Edited by M84 on Apr 21st 2020 at 10:04:39 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedSpeaking as an ex-Anarchist.
However, my view is that a strong central weaving of government positions and responsibilities plus a huge social safety net may eventually mean that no one can actually wield any kind of authority over others save within a very limited scope of activities. Changing society into a kind of leveled one with rights for all that prevent people wielding authority [and abusing it] is a long term goal that should be focused on only after:
- Addressing economic disparities
- Instituting universal human rights
But the goal of ending hierarchy should definitely be built around that. The thing is that preserving freedoms must also be a major focus.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.I left anarchism because I realized that assholes would take the end of old institutions as a chance to build their own dictatorships.
So you need a weak but all present state to prevent a new strong state arising.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Lolbertarians do still care about money — lots of it.
Speaking of animal hierarchies...it is rather interesting that some animals have essentially established politics for themselves. Animal politics. Sure, it's typically nothing more sophisticated than pecking away at each other to see who is top chicken, but that's still politics.
Domesticating these animals was in a sense, an act of conquest. We subverted their power structures, their hierarchies, for the sake of making it easier to farm, to travel, and for a really good hamburger.
Now insects otoh, don't have politics.
Nonetheless, we can still domesticate them because they're insects. They can't really comprehend we even exist in the first place, making it far easier for us to mess around with their breeding.
I imagine that if some Sufficiently Advanced Aliens were out to domesticate humans, it'd be a lot more like running a honeybee farm than running a chicken coop.
Edited by M84 on Apr 21st 2020 at 10:33:05 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedPersonally I think the tendency for hierarchies to crop up in human civilization is due to our primate ancestry. Most social primates have social structures built on rank and domination, particularly chimpanzees which are our closest living relatives. So the need for rank and chain of command is literally built into us.

Maybe not even that, after all, the creed of the communists of those days was that the revolution had to be spread across the world.
Edited by raziel365 on Apr 20th 2020 at 8:24:02 AM
Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.