this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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What about "dictatorship of the proletariat", especially the flawed interpretation every ML government has used. How isn't it authoritarian?
What traditionally has happened when you try to create your own party to run against "the party". Or just push back against the party in general.
Not that a ML country, much less an actual communist country should have billionaires. But what about what happened to Jack Ma, Bao Fan, Xiao Jianhua, or Guo Guangchang. Even if they committed crimes. You apprehend criminals. Not abduct/disappear them. The events around then were very opaque and suspect. Not that I have much sympathy for billionaires. But we only hear about this because they're billionaires. They aren't the only ones this happens to however.
As I said it's not just billionaires either. Not to Dogpile on china. They are just the biggest example. And Russia has given up all illusion of being Marxist leninist or laughably much less communist. What's been going on with the Uyghurs? That seems pretty authoritarian. Or the silencing of people and influencers pertaining to them like Nadine Wu. Who also just happens to point to another good issue. Why did she have to live as a young boy for her entire childhood. Neither she and her parents wanted it. But it was forced on them by external factors. Why was that? What could that have been? Sounds like some powerful authority had them very rattled just trying to live their own lives.
I could go on and on. But you get the idea. Now I'm not a hypocrite. I acknowledge the effectiveness that many ML governments have helped industrialize their host countries. (Much like the capitalists) And the research and innovation that has sometimes created. That the Soviet Union, China etc aren't/weren't the hell holes many capitalists claim. Well outside of often spartan, brutalist architecture. But that isn't unique to them. But they aren't a utopia either. And aren't in any way significantly morally superior than the imperialist capitalists they love to decry.
The dictatorship of the proletariat refers to an early phase of socialism in which the bourgeoisie hasn't been eliminated as a social class yet, but in which a revolution has triumphed and given the power to the working class. Until the elimination of privately-owned means of production, this society would be ran by the proletariat uniquely, mostly against the interests of the owning class. That's the sense in which it is a dictatorship of the proletariat. If that power is exercised in a democratic manner, for example, through the decisions of worker councils and their representatives catalyzed through a communist vanguard party, I don't see how that's authoritarian, except against capitalists.
I don't have much to argue against what you say about china, other than it obviously isn't Marxist-Leninist and it's not the model of country I defend.
Multiple-party systems don't ensure democracy, and single-party systems don't ensure authoritarianism. A Marxist-Leninist will defend the idea that the power should ultimately reside in the worker councils, known as Soviets in the former USSR. The objective of the party in this case isn't to rule authoritatively and from the top down, but to translate to Marxist language and policy the demands of the workers and bring them to fruition. There should be nobody in the party's higher spheres whose position can't be revoked at any time at the will of the masses. When those conditions apply, it doesn't matter much.
Depends on what you mean "pushing back against the party". If the party is the institution that carries out the will of the workers as I explained before, then pushing back against "the party" as a whole is reactionary. If you mean pushing back against some of the decisions, that should be welcome as long as it's done in a constructive way, as is the historical case, with different tendencies opposing each other within the parties of countries like Cuba or the USSR.
Again, I'm not here to defend particularly the role of given countries (although I don't see what you have against brutalism, it's cool imo). I'm here because I'm a Marxist-Leninist who wants to build upon the successes and the mistakes of past attempts at communism, and seeing how the only successful revolutions have been led my Marxist-Leninists (I'm Spanish so my country knows very well what a frustrated liberal-democracy attempt at socialism is), I see it as the way to build forward.