First time posting on this site. I spend a lot of time on (4chan) /lit/ and this board gets occasionally brought up there. I have a political question regarding leftist politics and I'd rather not shit up /lit/ with yet another politics thread and asking Holla Forums about it would probably be pointless so I figured I'd ask here. Hope that's okay, the FAQ seems to indicate so.
I never read anything Trotsky wrote but I heard he criticized USSR for degenerating and allowing the new bureaucratic class to usurp power and run the show.
The main reason I'm personally mistrustful of leftist (socialist? communist? collectivist?) economic policies is that I believe they tend to lead to bloating of the public sector, inefficiency, and a growing unchecked bureaucratic class often associated with nepotism and corruption.
How would a hypothetical future leftist society eventually achieve communism and have the state wither away without the bureaucratic class usurping power, like it happened in the USSR?
Did Trotsky only criticize Stalin's USSR or did he also provide an alternative in any of his writings? Did Marx ever explain how the state would eventually wither away?
I am aware that libertarian left, communist left, anarchists etc. exist but outside of knowing a bit of historical trivia regarding CNT-FAI and Spartacists and the armed conflicts they were involved with, I'm completely ignorant as to how those ideologies work and what sets them apart from "tankies".
Personally I'm not TOO sure that Communism can be achieved via the form of marxist leninism, hence why I am anarcho-syndicalist but even I'm doubtful that communsim, as envisioned by Karl Marx, could last in the long run, albeit there have been instances where SOME could argue that it has worked
The main reason I'm personally mistrustful of leftist (socialist? communist? collectivist?) economic policies is that I believe they tend to lead to bloating of the public sector, inefficiency, and a growing unchecked bureaucratic class often associated with nepotism and corruption. Anarchists are against all those problems and almost all advocate communism these days. Confusing? It's because liberals have fed you the wrong definition of the word. If you want say "state ownership", just say "state ownership", not communism.
Communism is a stateless, classless society based on the principle "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs". What that means in practice is that workers run their own firms, government is reduced wherever possible to face-to-face democracy, and institutions become voluntary. Anarchists want an immediate transition to this system, Marxists believe it necessary to seize state power. It gets much, much more complicated than that once you dive into semantics and theoretical conceptions, but for now, that's probably good enough.
As for the economic organization of society, anarcho-syndicalists (and their relatives, plain anarcho-communists and platformists) want for their worker-run firms to be organized into industrial syndicates (all mining firms in the mining syndicate, all tech firms in the tech syndicate, etc.) and for the economy to be planned by collective bargaining between revocable delegates.
We also support the integration of cybernetic planning networks into the economy, so as to maximize efficiency in the absence of markets. See this thread:
It will last once it becomes worldwide and work has become automated. There's no other reasonable option.
dont have a lot of time right now but you might want to look into communization
Daniel Richardson
Look into Luxemborgism. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a dictatorship of a class, not party, socialism requires economic and political democracy.
Lucas Thompson
It wouldn't. Vanguardism is a failed ideology. Look into Communization, Anarchism and Democratic Confederalism etc.
Well for one thing, they don't support the vanguard party. There are a variety of other tactics used, I listed some of them above. The biggest difference is that they eschew any notion of "control" of the state and only seek to abolish the state by direct or indirect means.
Jayden Johnson
I mean I agree with this analysis, but at the same time it doesn't really help OP's question. Sure, the USSR was capitalist, but they were trying to industrialize such that they could actually move towards socialism. If socialism is the resolution of the contradictions of capital, clearly these contradictions have to be manifested for their usurpation.
Maybe a more apt question is how should they have gone from industrialization to communism? How can you make sure that the state remains tied to the interests of the workers, and not the state itself, especially given the generations that had to pass between revolution and industrialization?
Luke Allen
You seem to have an interest Trotsky's theories, so I'll try to answer your questions with them.
Trotsky's idea was to form a party that allowed internal disagreements, and to keep the party in check by forming worker's councils(an example of a worker's council would be the Petrograd Soviet, which Trotsky was a leader of). Trotsky hoped that by allowing, to an extent, dissent in the party, it would allow legitimate members to remove bureaucratic elements. It was also hoped that if the party was too far gone, the worker's council would be able to dispose of the bureaucrats in power.
Trotsky's alternative to Stalin's USSR was known as Permanent Revolution. Trotsky advocated for a revolution to take a global scale, as he thought that semi-developed countries like Russia would need socialist allies to stay afloat militarily and economically. Since the Soviets had already slid back into capitalism by the time of Trotsky's writings, this was no longer the case in the Soviet Union. They were able to industrialize and strengthen themselves on their own through the bureaucratic class.
As for Marx, Engels was actually the person to coin the term when he said,"The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not "abolished", it withers away". But, this is the original and most basic meaning of what happens when a state withers away.
Sorry for practically writing a doctoral dissertation, it's just hard to write this stuff concisely. This is barely scratching the surface though, and I'm super tired so sorry if something looks weird or doesn't make sense or isn't fully developed.
Colton Gray
The irony here is that Trotsky basically advocated that very idea back when he had a shot at power. The point is that you should never listen to Trots. They are idealists who pretend to be communists.
Benjamin Brooks
But communism is inherently idealist.
Carter Martin
'no'
Jason Williams
Read literally anything by later Marx. Hell, even Stirner btfo's idealism and lays out a groundwork to support communism on a non-idealist basis.
Joshua Lewis
Read Marx user.
Kevin Wilson
Explain
Carter Perry
The whole point of communism, anarchist or Marxist, is to avoid the pitfalls of utopian socialism (the grand schemes with every detail planned out beforehand, like those of Owen, Saint-Simon, and Comte) by studying past societies and tendencies in human society and otherwise (anthropology has verified Marx's "primitive communism" hypothesis, biology has verified Kropotkin's theory of mutual aid repeatedly).
All communism is materialist and anti-idealist. We know it works because it's based off past instances such as the Iroquois Confederacy, the stanitsi of Cossacks, and the constitutional-democratic communism of 18th-century pirates (not mentioned by either, but worth mentioning here).
If you want more info on past societies from which conceptions of a modern communism have arose, you can read "The Origins Of Family, Private Property, And The State" (Engels, the Marxist perspective) or "Debt: The First 5000 Years" (Graeber, an anarchist perspective). I have to get around to reading them myself, but they're both highly recommended by everyone who has read them.
Why the hell is Proudhon grouped with idealists? Marx praised him as the first exponent of a scientific socialism.
Jeremiah Butler
Recommend me a book to start.
A successful revolution would need support from the masses, the crushing of counter-revolutionaries, a way to defend itself from foreign powers… Pretty easy isn't?
Are you sure? From what I know it's mostly discredited by now. Thanks for the recs, I'll check them, but there are still the problems I mentioned above.
Christian Rodriguez
You know how Lenin praised freedom, then slowly eroded them once in power? How he praised democracy but avoided open elections? How he defended the Constituint Assembly then dissolved it? How he promised all power to the soviets but then hollowed them out?
None of that shit can happen if we want a chance at the state not degenerating. He might get a pass because the situation he was dealing with was apocalyptic – and I honestly think he would make good on those promises if his health hadn't failed him – but sadly, good intentions or not, he did leave the stage all set for Stalin.
If only the German Revolution had won, we could be living in the best timeline now.
One user here one day pointed me the double tragedy of Lenin. The first one is the events I mentioned, him having to go back on all his promises and ideals in order to just plain keep the country and government from collapsing. I have no doubt that the guilt from this and the stress from dealing with such a terrible situation were a vital factor on his strokes. And that's the second tragedy: with the country finally pacified and reunited, he could begin his work in earnest and make good on his promises. But we know how he was denied his chance at redemption. The man who could have salvaged the world revolution and get mankind started on the path to utopia was now to be merely the enabler of one of history's greatest tyrants.
