What if we had maoism, but we replaced the democratic centralism with organic centralism?

what if we had maoism, but we replaced the democratic centralism with organic centralism?

Other urls found in this thread:

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
marxists.org/reference/archive/makhno-nestor/works/1926/platform/index.htm).
marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1926/05/neither.htm.
libcom.org/library/eclipse-re-emergence-communist-movement
marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/class-party.htm
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It would result in too much clusterfuck. Just stick to what we know works.

but everyone else is the utopian? Lmao will you fags just leave

but nothing's worked yet

Nothing ever works, all that exists will perish.

damn

There are no happy endings here, comrade.
Love is dead.

It would be exactly the same except even more retarded

maoism is good except for the democratic centralism tho

Organic centralism is the same as democratic centralism except with more blatant defence of despotism and totalitarianism

Literally the mass line with less autism.

how do we preserve the good parts of maoism without making it incoherent then

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what else would you call it?
you can't just call everything a fucking democracy because you said so.

You can't have a revolution without unity, in other words centralization. Enjoy your week-long revolution.

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And you cannot have a DOtP without democracy. Gee, it's almost like they are two different things.

There was nothing democratic about Blanqui's rule in the Paris Commune yet Marx coined the term DotP based on that exact event. You want worker self-representation but that's impossible. Name a single working class event in history that has had self-representation. You can't, because as you'll notice the leadership of such events are always, always always a muh privileged elite; the vanguard of an insurrection. Even the most democracy-fetishizing horizontalists in the anarchists failed to have their kinks be more than hot air. Revolution must always be led, and where there is leadership there is representation of the mass thrust forward.

you;'re wrong lol

Compelling argument.

WTF I have a fetish for a democracy now???!

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If there's one thing we can exact from Marx's comments on the Paris commune it's "don't do that"

And regardless, you're still conflating revolution with the DOtP in of itself. As far as self management goes, there was the early periods of the Russian revolution before the soviets were crushed, Catalonia, Rojava, the Zapatistas, several parts of vietnam during the war. Sure, there was leadership, but you could at least say the masses had control over that leadership to a great extent when it came to self administration.

And all of them failed. One might even say there is a connection between those two facts.

then why did the bolsheviks supress the soviets or turn them into mere tools of party power?

If you read his commentary on the communard uprising you will notice that muh democracy is barely ever mentioned, and the point is not to essentialize Marx's hot take here but to active our grey matter and make an argument. If we read from Marx we look at what his argument actually was and see if it's (still) legitimate. In any case Marx critiqued the Paris Commune not ultimately on capitulating; this was seen as near-inevitable because in spite of Blanqui's military prowess he would have needed an AoM God Power or something to win against the French imperial army. The critique was mostly laid not on the fact that it was a DotP (it was), but that it went and barricaded itself; tried to aim for long-term self-sufficiency, rather than using the little short-term sufficiency it had to potentially revolt outwards on perhaps an international level with foreign workers' organizations.

For Marx the DotP is the revolution; the revolutionary transformation of society. The DotP does this by, through being in reign, suppressing the bourgeoisie and bourgeois ideology and transforming social relations from private to communist.

That was just self-management. It was precisely repeating the fatal flaw of the Paris Commune Marx outlined: not aggressively taking initiative and using the little time a DotP will exist versus bourgeois powers to suppress bourgeois society everywhere, and indeed transform it. Self-management here was of course an achievement, but it went nowhere. Of course it ultimately did what it had to do in order to survive: leadership took the reigns and tried, often already on the last breath of such DotPs, to make it count.

Rofl. Now this is just epic self-contradiction. The left SRs for example in Russia were absolutely not democratic. There was democracy at the head of the Soviets, where there was leadership, and to a lesser degree outside it, but when it was necessary the whims of the leaders always prevailed, and luckily they did, otherwise we would speak of the death of the supreme council in '07 when the Tsarist Okhrana stated its first big attack rather than during the first World War, where it did ultimately go under because of the pressure.


You missed the part of my comment where I said that no revolution ever hasn't had one, whether nominal or not, and that they all failed regardless of whether they fancies themselves anarchist or not. This start with the Bakuninists in 19th century Spain ffs up until Catalonia, labor camps and secret police included. The only honest and quasi-Leninist one of them was Makhno, who fully understood that strict organization and leadership was necessary. A rudimentary investigation into the reality of all revolutionsts, social anarchist or Marxist communist, will show this.

So what we have until now is: everything failed because muh fetish didn't prevail, but muh fetish never managed to anyways, even if everyone involved promised to make it prevail.

Ya'll niggas need Engels: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm (or Makhno, since I mentioned him and he understood all these things and acted accordingly: marxists.org/reference/archive/makhno-nestor/works/1926/platform/index.htm).

I literally just said in the part you quoted that self-representation is impossible, and that you need revolutionary unity. They suppressed decentralized power precisely because during critical times they realized that there was no other way to make the thing survive. If the Party in Russia had not centralized power after Brest-Livotsk if would have been annihilated by the most basic type of opponent like the scrambling Whites or any other imperial State (literally every State surrounding the RFSFR rofl). It seems that everyone when faced with the necessity of centralization turns into an enlightenment (bourgeois) liberal: "power corrupts m'kay, just lay over and die when it turns out there's no other option".

And this reveals a profoundly idealist conception of democracy: you desire its viability as if it already is, leading you to see deviation from the democratic ideal as some type of pre-willed authoritarian expression rather than the materially-necessitated expression of authority that can already be anticipated will be necessary when faced with the same issues.

I.e. democracy fetishists will always blame authority on an outside party. They are incapable of seeing democracy as it can appear materially. No surprise because they never investigate the history of democracy, how it emerged, how it operated, when it operated, in what form, when it dissolved, et cetera.

even after the bolsheviks had solidified their power, they still insisted on repressing the anarchists, the Kronstadt sailors and the Worker's opposition in the name of 'unity', all while literally restoring capitalism under the NEP. power does corrupt and it invariably becomes an end in itself.

And here it did not even need to be forced under their nose for anarchists to realize this as well as the Marxist communists. Very based anarchists like Malatesta already understood that no mode of organization can ever be fetishized, especially democracy: marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1926/05/neither.htm. Anarchists would do best to read him and consider his points.

ok, but MLs fetishise the superior rationality of the party instead

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LOL

You are one of the most based posters of the board. Thank you for being gold in a sea of shit.

youre a samefag or a fanboy who keeps sucking off this tankie in literally every thread he posts in. kill yourself.

there has to be a middle way between fetishising democracy and fetishising the authoritarian party state.

are you the guy who got btfo 15 times in this thread?

organic… centralism?

I can tell that you're a liberal right now, and will outright drop any pretense in the following years. It is inexorable, unless you dedicate yourself to reading theory rather than making such 'arguments'.


M8, if I have read him well, he is not fetishizing either. What he is criticizing is that many people put democracy as an state of affairs to be established (at all costs), rather than something existing out of the rationality of it at a given moment. This is not to say that he is praising tyranny as some people incapable of reading strawman leftcom arguments, equating them with le tankies XDD.

For the exact same reasons: they saw that Russia could not stagnate under democratic self-management for this self-management would fail to keep alive the authoritarian unity required to face the many problems Russia was still facing, notably all the coming offensives from outside during the interwar period, as well as the rise of fucking fascism which was already anticipated would try to break communism beyond its borders. We can equivocate about just how necessary it was to fully suppress these rebellions rather than reason with them, but they could not be allowed to break the tight grip central power needed to secure long-term sustainability of an organ with the communist programme.


Just MLs? All Leninists had a penchant for fetishizing the party, Lenin himself, Trotsky, Bukharin, Bordiga, etc., though not all did. In the OP organic centralism is mentioned, which aims at maintaining centrality but under any form. The class-party should be central when that is desired, otherwise power can be let into workers' councils when that is desirable (Bordiga in "Class and Party" from 1921 speaks heavily of a reciprocal mode of centralization).

But yeah, MLs did end up fetishizing it, but again there came a point when centralization had indeed managed to save the Russian revolution and it had saved it but then put Russia on a track towards regular capitalist development more and more. I don't want to blame things entirely on the conditions, but mass-industrialization became incredibly important in isolation, forcing things like the NEP, then collectivization (which did actually decentralize a lot of power into the Sov- and kolkhoz systems, which were inter-cooperative and relatively insular). The point of no return was obviously triggered by internal party decisions, though, like when it became apparent a bourgeois polity was emerging as party policy was made to shift rightwards. Purging of people like Bukharin (ironically called "rightists" by the purging leadership lol) proved that this character was more and more prevalent. This is why I don't support the idealist noton that Stalin was a great demon who since day one plotted regression; circumstance more than anything made the Stalin as he became as well as the rest of the party's nature.

The point remains that, call it what you want, centralization is a focal point of a revolution's origins, as well as an inevitable step that needs to be taken when the going gets rough (and it will get tough when you are a DotP suppressing bourgeois society and bourgeois society outside of your DotP knows it can't take chances).

Yes: realizing that democracy is just as much conditionally desired as centralization. As I mentioned above democracy did exist in some forms even under the late regime of Stalin in the factory collectives (kolkhozes), because it was desirable. Such is the very nature and signaled apparition of modes of organization when we understand historical materialism.

M-maybe we won't fuck it up next time.

thanks for confirming youre who i thought you were, you little subservient worm / samefag weirdo

You didn't prove anything by that. Your argument is that a non-hierarchical structure is impossible to have in a revolution, because it has never been achieved before. By that logic, one can also say that communism is not possible because it has never been achieved before.
Engels is missinterpreting the anarchists' position, and Makhno is advocating for more organisation, rather than hierarchical organisation. Most anarchists do advocate for a high level of organisation nowadays. However, platformism is cancer because it focusses on infiltrating other groups rather than building something new. Not to mention that platformists tend to be activism-obsessed assholes.

lol was my first post in this thread, and my only post in the other thread was this

I was late to the party both times. you're doing great tho, keep it up :)

Can somebody in this thread enlighten me how Mao was democratic in any way ?

Mao wasn't, Maoism in principle is.

I'm going off of Luxemburg's vision of the DOtP, I never asserted that marx critiqued the paris commune for a lack of democracy, only that it shouldn't be our goal to replicate it.

His goal is to instead institute a state capable of defending the revolution, in his arguments with Bakunin he clearly outlines this as a state in the present political form. If that is to be the case, what kind of state can it be?

I would say that a dictatorship of the proletariat in the Paris commune was only possible thanks to the political and economic form of the communes themselves.

We're talking about rural southern Mexico, rural Vietnam and rural northern Syria here, not France on the eve of capitalism. You can't honestly expect them to take on global capital alone, that would be suicide. That would require something in modern day usa or China.

In the end, the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia was destroyed either way. Did it really matter all that much whether it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin or the tzars? Perhaps, but neither path led to the creation of communism.

If it is the same as bourgeois democracy, then it doesn't combat anything.

Mass line, dual power, protracted people's war, etc.

All these concepts were applied during his rule. I would consider that Mao's rule is an integral part of Maoism, and the Great Leap Forwards is every bit as Maoist as his theoretical books, but I see your point.


What good is communism if not for the people ? How can a country be socialist if it doesn't listen to its people, if it doesn't represent them in the legislative and executive process ? Or is the separation a powers a bourgeois concept ?
Those are genuine questions, perhaps asked a bit provocatively. I don't think Socialism can be forced on people.

You made a claim. You know it is false. Democracy, as it currently exists, is a farce. It serves to try to hide the power of the bourgeoisie over society, and give the proletariat the illusion of choice. For the workers, it is a rigged game: you need money to campaign and hope to win, and even if you do win, your power of action is limited to managing certain parts of capitalist society. Though I guess that is what social-democrats want, so it makes sense.

It isn't.

It cannot.

It does come from liberal thinkers, so one might say so.

I don't think so either, but you confused my opposition to bourgeois democracy as an opposition to democracy as a method in socialism. The workers need to organise into councils, and these will be the basis of the new society. These councils function through direct democracy, and the representatives that they elect can be removed from power at any point, for any reason, and can never go against decisions taken by the assemblies, nor fail to represent any.
Any other system for organising socialism will inevitably lead to the formation of class society once again, because it never effectively abolished class at all.

Well, thanks for the answers, but I guess it shows we have a fundamental disagreement.

I would disagree. The power of the bourgeois can be kept in check and challenged by the State. I don't believe a Republic is inherently bourgeois.
Which is a disagreement at the base.

That's what Maduro thought, and look where that got him.

this is why i find myself sympathizing more and more with anarkiddies despite all muh marxist theory. many Marxists seem more fixated on soviet apologetics than on actually liberating people or creating a practical programme for communism. you can tell me humanity is a bourgeoisie spook and the only thing that matters is muh materialism, but isn't this a vision as dehumanising as the worst of capitalism? didn't the bolsheviks make any mistakes? couldn't have things gone differently? what reason do people have for supporting communism if it is nothing but a mechanistic and inhuman movement? great industrial projects, mountains of steel, mountains of wheat and corpses, 70 years in the waiting room of paradise and all for nothing.


Also I'm not sure about the equation of the totalitarian state with 'practicality' and expediency, if anything, history seems to suggest the opposite is true. Even Lenin thought yes men and opportunists were becoming a problem within the party. Many famines started because no one was allowed to question the 'superior rationality' of the state. The vanguard is not the metaphysical will of the proletariat incarnate, but a collection of human and flawed individuals, detached by their very nature from the drudgery of work and the pains of hunger. Are you gonna tell me to kill all the sparrows like Mao did under the four pests campaign? leading to ecological imbalance, the destruction of crops and mass starvation?

What about the old bolsheviks who lived to see everything they fought for betrayed in the name of expediency and unity? The only constant, the only fetish is the state, the leviathan reduced to its fundamental function of shooting people who become inconvenient to power. The 'transitionary stage' tends to perpetuate itself indefinitely. the experts of the Communist Party of China tell us maybe in 600 years we will be ready for full communism.

Not with this centralism bullshit. How many millions have to die for you people to see?

Someone give me a quick rundown on what organic centralism actually is.

Maduro and the Bolivarian National Narcos and Bourgeoisie (good guys) couldn't keep the US aligned oppositional narcos and bourgeoisie (bad guys) in check, hence the need for an authoritarian state. there's also the dissident unions and leftists but you will never hear about that from tankies.

Dude, you are like 2 steps away from becoming a leftcom.

Have you read this? libcom.org/library/eclipse-re-emergence-communist-movement

Leftcoms, or at least the Italian leftcoms buy into the same bullshit.

Bordiga openly advocated for a totalitarian one party state, he couldn't care less about despotism.
marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/class-party.htm

I know. I linked to a book by the communisation type of leftcoms. Similarly to the council-communists they reject the party form.
The book is kind of frustrating, because it doesn't really say anything about how to get to communism, concretely speaking. However, it does present it from a very humanist point of view, and helps one to expand his knowledge.
I'm still half-way through it tbh, but when I saw you talk about lack of humanity, it imediately came to mind.

Not that user, I just don't want the leftcoms to lead him down a path of tyranny.

More people need to call bordiga out imo.

Maduro was corrupted to the bone. He never played Democratic, actively ignoring the Parliment as soon as the opposition got inside.

I agree completely. Bordiga's ideology is as (if not more) dangerous than marxism-leninism when it comes to supporting totalitarian states.

do u mean the cultural revolution and protracted people's war? What else is necessary to preserve? You can just take those parts a-la-carte

You don't have to worry about that. Once a revolution shows any kind of flaws Leftcoms will immediately withdraw their support from it and blame it on "opportunism".

lmao you guys.

Yeah, but then they will say the problem was that it wasn't authoritarian enough.

whole foods maoist here

ask me about my ethical maoism

Woah, you sure showed me. I'm a tankie now.