My roommate has been educating himself on communism, and we have been having many great conversations on theory and what have you. He says he is a communist. However, he has come to some very different conclusions to me, and I have been going back and forth on his talking points a lot. I was wondering what you guys would think of his talking points since I have to hear them and discuss them with him a lot.
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Vanguardism/council republics are inherently flawed and undemocratic. He admits that there is democracy within a Marxist-Leninist government, but says it is not good enough because you don’t vote directly for the president, etc…
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Says that vanguardism is “elitist” and that the core of the idea is that the working classes are stupid and only the intelligentsia knows right. He said he liked Lenin but he was too “mean” and didn’t speak as kindly of the peasants as he wanted. (lol)
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Attributes the fall of the USSR entirely to the democratic organization of the government. Says that if the Soviet Union had allowed a more “libertarian” “democratic” structure what happened wouldn’t have happened. I’ve also notice he attributes a lot of China’s problems historically to the way their government is structured.
Yeah I went through that phase.
I grew past it when I accepted that direct democracy and consensus decision making and leaderless horizonalism can’t work while under siege by capitalist reaction and counter-revolution. That kind of structure might work in peace, not class war.
I came to that conclusion from watching and experiencing the failure of the 2010s protest movements - you can’t fight a revolution if everyone is debating everything all the time and there’s no leaders. There’s a good historical retrospective about this called If We Burn, highly recommend. The most important conclusion from the book was, if you don’t pick your leaders democratically, they will pick themselves.
That phase is called idealism and comes from a lack of any sort of analysis. It is an entirely contrived, utopian solution “to which reality will have to adjust itself.”
There is no ideal Marxist form of democracy other than the form which suits the conditions at hand.
It also comes from a lack of any sort of grounding in actual praxis or history. Without seeing how ideas interact with reality we just end up debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I did a reading club in /c/theory about If We Burn last year. It’s a great book.