• ExcrubulentEnglish
    24·
    17 days ago

    Rather it was the people using the new system to settle old scores or for personal advancement.

    Lenin, Mao, et al look at how many people had gotten into the party entirely for the purpose of abusing their positions for personal gain.

    How was that allowed to happen? Did they build a system of oppression that was ripe for takeover by petty tyrants, some of whom became actual, fully fledged tyrants, whilst simultaneously shutting down the mechanisms by which workers could have power over their own lives?

    This isn’t about whether Stalin personally gets into heaven, plus the absurd strawman that people think he did anything personally shows a complete lack of systemic thinking, which was ironically one of Marx’s great contributions to political thought. It is about whether the systems we build are liberatory or oppressive.

    The State is Counterrevolutionary

    • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
      1011·
      17 days ago

      I’m not watching a youtube video.

      Did they build a system of oppression

      No, such a system already existed, evidenced by the famines, massacres, etc that happened almost yearly in China and Russia before the revolutions.

      What I’m getting at is that while the post-revolution states weren’t utopias, they were far better than what came before. Telling people otherwise only serves to prolong the status quo.

      Also they kinda did have a government ready to go in the case of the USSR, the Soviets.

      simultaneously shutting down the mechanisms by which workers could have power over their own lives

      Except they had and used those mechanisms, as evidenced by the massive improvements to the average person’s lives after the revolution.

      the absurd strawman that people think he did anything personally

      Apologies, typically when I see people doing anti-communism use the term dictatorial, they mean a single person exercising absolute power. Though I don’t understand why you’d consider a dictatorship of the working class “hell”.

      • ExcrubulentEnglish
        154·
        7 days ago

        There was no dictatorship of the working class. They defanged the Soviets - you know the workers’ councils that the USSR was named for.

        You don’t have to watch a video, here’s the script text for the entire series:

        https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-the-state-is-counter-revolutionary

        MLs love reading, don’t they? Oh but wait, that’s anarchism. Go ahead, tell me it’s beneath you and I should read On Authority. I have. It was underwhelming to put it nicely.

        And yes, the system they built was on the back of and patterned after the authoritarian monarchist regimes they followed. That’s not a favourable light to put that system in. Was it marginally better than a monarchy? Sure, why is that relevant to anything? We live under neoliberal regimes of which none to my knowledge has ever been toppled by an ML revolution.

        That ideology is centuries out of date. Anarchists saw its downfall before it started. It’s failed.

        Even if you’re combatting some bizarre strawman about absolute dictators, it’s equally bizarre that your response is to attempt to rehabilitate Stalin’s character. That puts you squarely in tankie territory.

          • ExcrubulentEnglish
            104·
            17 days ago

            Assuming you’re trying to ask what that term means, it’s short for Marxist-Leninist, it’s a polite way of referring to tankies, where you accept their rebranding of what is effectively Stalinism. It was after all Stalin’s term to coopt and puppeteer the legacy of two dead men to give legitimacy to his reign of terror. They will try to tell you there are principled MLs but if they think there is any merit in the concept then they are doing the same kind of historical revisionism that all tankies do.

            And you can see this person was in fact clearly trying to defend Stalin, if only indirectly.

            Edit: Also look at the username - they’re from lemmy.ml, where the .ml is the Mali country code but in this case it definitely also stands for Marxism-Leninism. It’s a tankie instance.

            • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
              12·
              17 days ago

              been spending too much time reading about machine learning sorry but ty for the (now obvious) explanation.

              probably time for bed.

      • Prunebutt
        96·
        17 days ago

        I’m not watching a youtube video.

        Why not?

        • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
          83·
          17 days ago

          The way they feed you information is patronizingly slow, and while I’m not expecting a widely cited academic paper published in a reputable journal, Youtube essays are one step below shitposts on internet forums in trustworthiness and academic rigor.

          • Prunebutt
            51·
            17 days ago

            Guess we’re watching different video essays, then. Most are edutainment at best, true. But there are *soy many with cited sources on youtube.

            • ExcrubulentEnglish
              3·
              16 days ago

              I gave them the text as published on the anarchist library, but they didn’t seem to appreciate that either. It’s almost like they just don’t want to learn history that isn’t their revisionist version of it.

              • Prunebutt
                2·
                16 days ago

                Everyone knows that any critique of Stalin is CIA propaganda. /s

                • ExcrubulentEnglish
                  3·
                  16 days ago

                  The frustrating thing is that most of it was CIA propaganda at one point in time, it just happened to also be true, which made it much more effective propaganda. It’s a big gift the USSR gave to anti-communists.