Usually complaining about "tankies" is just another way to hate Socialism, the Red Scare never ended and being aware of it doesn't make you immune to its effects in any capacity. "Left" anticommunists have a long legacy and have done immense damage to Socialism worldwide.

Blackshirts and Reds is phenomenal in total, but specifically the subsection Anticommunism & Wonderland should be necessary reading.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

My friend, there is an ideological ocean between "workers should collectively own the means of production" and "we need an authoritarian state with a monopoly on violence to enforce communism."

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

we need an authoritarian state with a monopoly on violence

We already have one. Americans just need to keep believing the monopoly is working for them, rather than for their bosses, or the system of compliance falls apart.

[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 days ago

I swear to god westerners have had over a hundred years to read The State and Revolution and we're still having the same dumb fucking argument.

In the time y'all take to talk shit about any revolution that actually succeeds you could have read about twenty books on the subject.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 15 points 3 days ago

It’s not because we have a boner for authority, it’s because history has shown us that, under the current conditions of global capitalist/imperialist hegemony, such a state is a necessary step in the process of reaching a classless society. It’s simply not possible to go directly from where we are right now to where all socialists want to end up. That’s why anarchism has never had a win that’s lasted more than few months before capitalist forces crush it.

Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds:

But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 14 points 3 days ago (5 children)

There's an ideological ocean between utopian socialism and actually-existing socialism, yes. There's a reason why there's not been a successful historical instance of socialism in which workers collectivised without taking the power of the state in their hands.

Calling it "authoritarian state" kinda portrays lack of knowledge at democratic power structures and mechanisms in former socialist countries. Examples for the USSR: highest unionisation rates in the world, announcement/news boarboards in every workplace administered by the union, free education to the highest level for everyone, free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing (how do the supposedly "authoritarian leaders" benefit from that?), neighbour commissions legally overviewing the activity and transparency of local administration, neighbour tribunals dealing with most petty crime, millions of members of the party, women's rights, local ethnicities in different republics having an option to education in their language and widespread availability of reading material and newspapers in their language... Please tell me one country that does that better nowadays

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[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I mean this with all sympathy, after all, I used to share views similar to your own before I started taking Marxism seriously, and to dismiss you would be to dismiss myself, and thus the capacity for change. When you simplify Marxism to "workers should collectively own the Means of Production," you remove the entirety of Marxism, as such a thought was common even pre-Marx. When you simplify AES to "authoritarian states with a monopoly on violence to enforce Communism," you assume greater knowledge of the practice of building Socialism than the billions of people who have worked tirelessly to bring it into existance for the last century from the inside, not criticizing from afar.

With all due respect, and no "I've read more than you so my power level is higher" nonsense, have you read Marx?

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

With all due respect to theory, I've seen too much of it shit all over people who lack education, context, or ability to understand, and basically leaves those people out of the conversation and acts like their opinions don't matter because they haven't read the right books or have the right education.

The differences between academic unions and blue-collar unions were always stark to me, and when there was ever any connection between the two, the academics would roll their eyes and be dismissive of the blue-collar people, who may have not always been theory conscious but were good people, a la Samwise Gamgee (in terms of Tolkiens ideas of the kind of good, kind, but simple people he met in WWI). Constantly telling those people that they don't know enough to be involved isn't ever really a positive way forward, in my opinion, and anything where it's forced from the top-down on those people instead of having their input is something I'm against, sorry. You can't explain away taking away people's right to input in their own governance with theory, to me.

I've read some Marx, but never got my hands on an unabridged copy of Capital, nor did I finish it because it was pretty tedious. I personally think Debord had way more profound things to say, and Society of the Spectacle is the most dog-eared book I own. Mixed with McLuhan's Understanding Media, I'm actually partial to think communications might actually be neck-and-neck with commodities in terms of importance of understanding them. I mean, Debord thought that too, which is why he thought he would be remembered for his board game Kriegspiel, (a war game focusing on lines of communication) not for SotS.

[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

ve seen too much of it shit all over people who lack education, context, or ability to understand,

It kinda irks me seeing comrades engage with people assuming they're arguing in good faith and immediately it turns out it's just unabashed western chauvinism. The fact that you refer to Debord is just the icing on the cake.

I've read Debord, guy had a good fifteen page essay hidden inside The Society of the Spectacle and then over a hundred pages of masturbatory inscrutability of the kind Zizek perfected and good old french chauvinism. I put more stock in the works credited by people who actually achieved revolution and then a better quality of life for their nations through them. A social science requires falsifiability.

On the other hand, there is Lenin boiling down in a hundred pages a very thorough understanding of Marxist thought and the critical steps the revolution must take to defend itself as well as the reasons for it. No fluff, no academicist posturing, just keeping in the Marxist tradition of making the subject only as complex as it needs to be. Then he went and fucking proved it with his practice.

Capital isn't an entry level text, it is a thorough study of the mechanisms of capital, the value form, the objects of financial speculation and their interaction with the real material economy. Critique of the Gotha Programme, The Poverty of Philosophy, The German Ideology, even Socialism: Utopic and Scientific by Engels are thorough, clear, and concise. And they work.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 days ago

Yea, I try to make it a rule to engage in good-faith almost regardless of what the other person is saying unless it's clear that nothing can come from it, be it reaching the other person or reaching onlookers. In this case, it was more for the latter.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (9 children)

I am not trying to tell you that your opinions are "invalid" or "worthless." You raise a good problem well known by actual, practicing Marxists about Western "Marxists" that seek to endlessly critique society without changing it. However, it would be a mistake to not learn from Socialists in the past and present who have a wealth of experience and lifetimes of analysis to draw from. Rather, my goal isn't telling you that you don't know enough to be involved, but that I think you are making a critical error in attacking Socialists based on what I believe are misconceptions and misunderstandings, and this hurts leftist movement.

I think if you made an effort to understand what these billions of Socialists believe in and are committed to, you would better understand if their ideas and systems are valid or not. I think without reading theory that you are only going to have an incomplete and partial view, and this, while not delegitimizing your opinions and views, certainly harms the integrity. Celebrating an "end to theory" was something the Socialist Revolutionaries adhered to pre-revolution in Russia, and this was proven a mistake, while the Bolsheviks' strict adherence to theory and mass worker organization proved correct.

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

when there was ever any connection between the two, the academics would roll their eyes and be dismissive of the blue-collar people, who may have not always been theory conscious but were good people, a la Samwise Gamgee

Samwise Gamgee isn't a good person, he's a fictitious character in a fantasy novel.

You can’t explain away taking away people’s right to input in their own governance with theory, to me.

You need to have something before it can be taken away from you.

Society of the Spectacle is the most dog-eared book I own.

Then you know the illusion of choice isn't the same thing as a people's right to self-governance. And further, that a movement of people in opposition to a media established regime is not stealing their neighbors' liberty by asserting some of its own.

Not even if all the TVs and radios and newspapers say so.

[–] alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 days ago (18 children)

How could any socialist country protect the workers without a state in 2025?

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago

complaining about “tankies” is just another way to hate Socialism

Even if you've got a legit beef with 1950s Stalinists, the idea that they've teleported through time to argue with you in English on a 4th rate social media forum is so fucking self-aggrandizing.

Blackshirts and Reds is phenomenal in total, but specifically the subsection Anticommunism & Wonderland should be necessary reading.

Would that Michael Parenti, David Grabber, and Richard Wolfe had been as ravenously consumed by Americans as Milton Friedman, David Brooks, and Anne Coulter.