The dictatorship advocated by marxism is necessary because it cannot be unanimously accepted and furthermore it will...

So is Bordiga here saying that the Revolution shouldn't concern itself at all with how many working class people are on board with it? Was he basically a super Blanquist who thought a coup d'etat would be fine even with 99% of the working class population not class conscious and working against the party?

Or is he saying all of this with the left com assumption that the Revolution happens after certain conditions are met, the conditions in part being the spread of class consciousness among the workers?

Did Bordiga just have a massive hard on for the intelligentsia? He seems like talk about a dictatorship of the party not as a dictatorship of people but rather as some abstract perfect force that is never wrong and always carries with it an objectively correct line.

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What did he mean by this? I feel like it's literally the opposite

Being a socialist who wants to let people vote for capitalism is like being an abolitionist who wants to let people vote for slavery. No, we are going to burn Atlanta to the ground, and we will force you to accept a new constitution at gunpoint.

Ingraining socialism into a constitution is one thing, but implementing it without majority support defeats the entire purpose.

I understand this position, but why does the dictatorship of the proletariat have to be borne out by a one party state managing everything?

Couldn't you have Socialism that can defend itself without viewing politics entirely through the lens of a party organization? Couldn't you argue that political parties are organizations that exist in capitalism to mediate class conflict and that socialism needs to move past parties by only operating through workers councils?

Fucking this.

It's a load of nonsense. You can ban capitalism without forming a one party dictatorship.

The capitalists did this fairly easily. In my country (Burgerstan), all non-republican forms of government are constitutionally banned and, in addition, its illegal for the government to issue or recognize any title of nobility.

Burger democracy has had lots of problems, but they didn't need a one party dictatorship to abolish feudalism.

You implement socialism as soon as physically possible. If a majority is what makes it possible (this is going to be necessary for most revolutions), great. If a violent coup or invasion is what works and is necessary (it will be, in some cases), then you do that, and you beat down the reaction with everything you've got. Building on the American Civil War example, reconstruction and military occupation of the South was 100% absolutely the right thing to do. It was necessary to attempt, regardless of the outcome. Unfortunately, abolition still had little support from Americans, so it failed, but the radicals had to keep themselves in power and keep it going as long as possible.

They had multiple events of insurrections, dictatorial reigns of terror plus a civil war to abolish the vestiges of feudalism and feudal economics.

Bordiga's idea of organic dictatorship is pretty close to a reign of terror ala the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution.

In the USSR, party factions were initially allowed, but had to go for the sake of unity under imperialist assault. I think it is basically window dressing whether you call a political stance a party or a faction– it's the same thing as long as there's no disagreement on the mode of society. In the USA, it is correct to view the party system as totally illusory, and to say that the Democrats and Republicans are just two slightly different factions of the Bourgeois Party.

So what are the advantages of a multi-faction system? Ostensibly, it means that the state will be more responsive to the minutiae of the people's concerns. It can also prevent entrenched party members from getting totally disconnected from normal life, and prevent normal people from getting disconnected from political life. However, we should also recognize that the party must press ahead of the masses and lead them at times. For a small example, the Vietnamese Communist Party lifted the ban on gay marriage before there was majority support for such a thing. This kind of forward-thinking action can make a one-party state not only more responsive in many cases, but actually preemptive.

I think a good compromise for the revolutionary (as opposed to hegemonic) proletarian state is the Iranian model or the Supreme Court model. Allow factions and elections, but maintain a separate vanguard that enforces strict adherence to the revolutionary doctrine in politics. The Iranian model has proven that it works under siege.

The situations aren't analagous. Socialism without majority support is an oxymoron. The abolition of slavery is something that can be imposed, but you can't impose democracy, ergo you can't impose socialism. If you were to implement socialism where people didn't want it, you couldn't implement democratic mechanisms, since the people would use them to dismantle socialism. But if you don't have democratic operation of the state and economy then it isn't actually socialism.

Abolitionism by contrast, does not negate its own existence by forcing itself on an unwilling populace. Socialism does.

He's 100% right.

This is just a string of nonsensical assertions. The imposition of the abolition of slavery DIDN'T truly last, precisely because the North retreated and allowed Jim Crow and sharecropping to take hold. On the other hand, the USSR was able to force socialism on numerous different countries, from East Germany to Ukraine.

Socialism is just a revolutionary phase between capitalism and communism. Democracy is a ridiculously vague ideal that has never been attained, whose merits depend completely on the end to which it serves. If there's no economic exploitation, no private ownership of capital, and no bourgeois class, then it sure as hell isn't capitalism, and it's pretty fair to say it's socialism.

what is this horseshit

imperialist bullshit, afghanistan anyone?

wait but in the other threads leftcoms talk about muh organic revolution this doesn't sound like that

The north were slavers too. The north only freeded the slaves because slave owners were training their slaves to do skilled labor like carpentry and masonry.

It completely destroyed white southerners ability to sell their labor, which is why even into today so many of them are dirt poor.

The north didn't want to get cucked by cheap slave labor like dumbass white southerners did.

Maybe your right but my study of current affairs seems to be the opposite is true.

You can't have democracy with capitalism because capitalist will just use democracy to vote in all the things that are in their best interest.

The founding fathers actually thought of this ironically and included a bill of rights which are close to impossible for capitalists to vote away *though still possible*

I think you actually can impose democracy. I think for it to work you basically have to under capitalism. I now understand why conservatives in the US so hate the bill of rights, it FORCES the state to protect them and and they are non negotiable

And if you can impose democracy you can impose socialism. It's a slippery slop though, what's to stop the party from imposing self serving bullshit, think one user said the Iranian model seems to work, but it seems to be as slow to respond to change as the soviet politburo was

Really activates your almonds huh

Bordiga has this anachronistic belief that those appointed to lead the DotP will always act in the interests of the revolutionary movement, because they're of the same proletarian class. It's not as if members of a non-democratic institution ever become more interested in preserving their own positions rather than advancing the cause of others!

It's no wonder state socialists are so thoroughly marginalized and discredited in popular discourse. If you follow this anti-democratic line of thinking then you basically have to hold the world's population at gunpoint for decades, if not centuries, until the last elements of capitalism and bourgeois society are stamped out. You're condemning the planet to generations of war and strife in order to eventually achieve some new mode of production. What will that mode of production look like? Well, we'll just the global socialist bureaucracy to come up with that, don't worry comrade, they're ""proletarians,"" we can trust them!

Pick one.

Even if you can impose democracy, that doesn't mean you can impose a specific policy within the framework of that democracy. If you are imposing a policy on people who don't want it then you don't have a democracy, you have a dictatorship.

Explain the point of socialism if the proles can't actually exercise their political power through democratic means? Or is the state just supposed to magically not descend into oligarchy? Socialism without democracy that is supposed to operate on some kind of honour system is ridiculous, it proposes an oligarchy that is expected to not act like every other oligarchy that has ever existed.

But if there is no democracy then you will have all of these things at least de facto. If there is no check on the power of the state then those that control the state will become a new ruling class overnight. This is exactly what happened in the USSR.

It's almost as if social change comes from material conditions… 🤔

The point of socialism is to destroy commodity production/capital accumulation and replace it with production of goods for use. You're fetishizing form over content.

smh

Whether or not horizontal structures are what's needed to abolish capital is a completely different issue than the idea that "democracy" itself is the goal of socialism, as implied by black cat poster

I think democracy is important but the revolution can't survive without a transitional period of say 10-20 years where the government can implement socialism unopposed, unless we live in some fantasy world where the majority of people participated in the revolution (never gonna happen)

Things haven't even started to get really bad yet.

A revolution may happen but it's never going to be a revolution of all people, for example the Bolshevik revolution involved 40,000 men, which is something around 0.031% of the population of the Russian Empire at the time. Let's say that all their wives and two kids were on board too, that's still only like 0.1%.

Afganistan was a mistake, but it wasn't imperialism. Stop using words you don't understand.


Weird how we live in the height of capitalist decadence, and real communists are marginalized. It's almost like the two things are related.


They exercise their political power by smashing the bourgeois class. They need the party to do this. Again, what are you going to do? Let people vote for capitalism? There's literally no point in voting on anything but minor local issues if you have a proletarian state.

The USSR descended into oligarchy when it allowed people to vote for capitalists. Really makes you think.

All democratic systems are on an "honor system." You vote for a guy and hope he'll keep his promises (he won't).

Even if you're a mega tankie I can't see how you don't see that concentrating too much power in the hands of the central administration contributed to the garbage Brezhnev Oligarchy that consisted of milktoast useless 80 year old incompetent fat asses

The concentration of power contributed to the liberation of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. The failure of that power, against immense odds, to liberate all of the planet (or enough to establish socialist hegemony) is what caused the stagnation and rot. You can't keep a revolution going for fifty years straight without fatigue setting in. The only true failure of the USSR was that they didn't win fast enough, and that simply was not their fault.

"Dictatorship of the proletariat" does not mean a dictatorship in the colloquial sense. It doesn't mean one man, or a small group of people, who rule with total authority.
It means that the proletariat dictate the interests and agenda of the state.
We currently live in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie–even in more democratic countries, the state serves bourgeois interests against the proletariat. In the dictatorship of the proletariat, this is inverted, and the state serves proletarian interests against the bourgeoisie.
This is an inherently temporary state, since one of the first orders of business for a dictatorship of the proletariat would be to abolish capitalism and implement socialism.
This is what Marxists mean when they talk about the "temporary dictatorship of the proletariat." They don't mean that a brief autocracy is necessary. They mean that the current conception of the state, if used by a class-conscious proletariat (and of course in as democratic a manner as possible), would be a necessary and inherently temporary state of affairs.

You have to count on a large fraction of the country to support them, though–or at least to not interfere. For every one man fighting in trenches, there are dozens of people creating the weapons, ammunition, food, clothing, medicine, etc., necessary for him to keep fighting. You need a large portion of the population to support this effort.

Look into direct democracy and delegative democracy, fam.

Never truly been done.

Direct democracy is done every day, just not on the national scale (except in Switzerland).
Anyway, the point is that it doesn't have the problems of representative democracy (namely, representatives being anything other than relatively powerless delegates). It has its own problems, but on the whole, it's superior.

You are all a bunch of dumb motherfuckers if you can't see the mother fucking somescreen bordiga has just made. So, because the revolution is supposed to be authoritarian, it's impossible for a small group of individuals to simply swap places with the capitalists? What nonsense! This only means that you can call anything you like a revolution to continue you're dictatorship! The exact point should be that yes, a revolution is authoritarian so we should be extremely careful about our revolution not creating an authoritarian society!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers'_council#Historical_examples