this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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Sooo... the working class should own the means of production?
Yes, but let's try to achieve that without state ownership of the means.
It's important to consider the conditions in which state ownership was deemed necessary. Countries with a starving and illiterate working class isn't as capable at a true worker owned economy as one that already has a well fed and educated working class. A true socialist society needs basic infrastructure and fulfillment of the basic needs of its people before it can be properly implemented.
Lenin's concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was intended to be a temporary system intended on rapid development and growth of the economy. It was more important to try and stop starvation and establish railroads than build worker co-ops. The mistake was when the leaders that came after decided to never cede power back to the working class.
Certainly Lenin and good compatriots has the best of intentions with their vanguard approach to intention. But, as you noted, that concentration of power ultimately corrupted in the hands of a nefarious few. These ideas were not Lenin's alone and even Marx promoted the idea of a Vanguard long before the Bolshevik revolution, which Bakunin (an early anarchist) was opposed due to the likelihood of the vanguard becoming entrenched within that power. That concentration of power by a class of elite was the mistake. To argue there wasn't time to educate the masses is to ignore the fallout of that approach. These are important lessons to remember, even should the future approach to revolution be focused on the establishment of worker co-ops. Positions of power and power between cooperatives are likely to remain and we will need systems of control to mediate these types of emergent hierarchies.