this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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This is beside the point but also fuck Trotsky. Trotsky’s basic idea consisted of applying military methods in the economic field and of turning the entire population of Russia into a vast army of labour, destroying the trade unions and forcing the workforce into jobs they could not leave without the permission of high authorities. Any shirking of duty or unauthorized absence from work was to be punished on the same basis as desertion from the army. Fuck that guy.
But also fuck capitalism. It's horrific.
The problem is that so many people can't see that there are any shades of grey between Trotskyist communism and free market capitalism. Like it has to be one absolute or the other. Such bizarre black-and-white thinking.
Hell yeah. Democratic Confederalism, Proudohnism, Council Communism... there are so many potential systems of anti-authoritarian socialism that have failed to flourish due to circumstance or conspiracy that could make life so much better for so many people.
Could consider that one of the effects of the capitalist west's active intervention to prevent any form of socialism and communism during the last... can just say century at this point but especially post-WW2 by sponsoring fascist intervention, is that it applied a selection criteria on which forms of these states could actually survive.
The Sovs spent almost as much time crushing non-ML left movements as the West did. Non-ML systems have had it from both sides.
Absolutely. Look at what the Bolsheviks did to the Makhnovshchina.
Marx also viewed capitalism as a necessary intermediary step towards achieving communism and saw it as an improvement to what existed before it. An amazing thing about the Russian Revolution and USSR is they went from feudalism to a modern communist state in less than a generation. In that context it was incredible what they were able to achieve in the time they did and we can recognize areas it worked independent of the rest.
There's been some pretty good discussion about whether capitalism or communism has resulted in more deaths overall, and the value in that isn't to arrive at some final tally to find who wins.
A lot of what Marx wrote about the two stage revolution was written in direct response to the failure of the Paris Commune. Marx also saw socialism as the inevitable successor to capitalism. But there are socialist traditions that predate his theories and there's nothing to say he was wrong on some things.
Yeah like his labor theory of value has basically been disproven but that doesn't have to negate his critique of modernity and his view of class conflict, notion of private property, exploitation, etc. Historical materialism is hugely influential even today. Marx didn't outline some rigid framework for a communist utopia either.
Hegel's idealism as well... Marx began as a Hegelian in Germany and increasingly became critical of Hegel's dialectic. His concept of dialectical materialism is a response to Hegel and turns it on it's head. The notion that material conditions aren't shaped by human ideas and values but instead that human ideas and values are a response to material conditions.