I’ll preface with saying that I’m only a random Communist. Please take what I say with a grain of salt, even if I come off as confident.
Regardless of your opinion on the war, it is not going to affect its course unless you go fight there, with a few exceptions.
Unless you live in Russia or Ukraine, your priorities should be:
- pressuring your country’s government for non-interventionism, including sanctions. Capitalist States have only the interest of capital in mind, and their intervention will hurt the people further
- fighting racism in your communities, especially the new wave of anti-Russian hate.
If you live in Poland or Romania, you should also be fighting the racism against non-Ukrainians (mostly foreign students) seeking refuge. Most of them just want to go home. The fact that the police are attacking them is extremely ridiculous.
I’m not denying that, but you have to observe that there was a reversal of neoliberalism in the 2000s that led to an economic boom. Don’t lecture me on this, I was there. I remember seeing in Moscow several skyscrapers 100+ stories tall being built in the city. Gazprom, the largest gas company in the world, being nationalized is the best example of this shift in economic policy. You can’t just hand wave these developments away.
Don’t take it up with me if you actually see things this simplistically. You need to take it up with Mao. Did you know that two of the stars on the chinese flag represent the petit bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie?
It’s fine if you think you know better than Mao though. Just show me where southerntofu thought has actually worked in the world to develop socialism and I’ll believe you.
Skyscrapers are a symbol of industrial capitalism: i don’t see a link with socialism. As for nationalizing gaz, once again i don’t see the link: to me socialism has to do with workers self-organizing the means of production, not with a centralized State apparatus controlling everything. I do not see any evidence that ordinary people of Russia/Belarus/Kazakhstan/Chechnya are doing well, but i see plenty of evidence otherwise.
From what i hear from comrades over there, it’s hard to make a living unless you work in IT or finance or as a higher-level public servant (to be fair, the same can be said around here). In Chechnya, i would go so far as to say the government relies on slave labor from the local population. Nationalization is not communism, or by that standard, renowned french fascist de Gaulle was a communist hero and France is a socialist paradise, all with nationalized healthcare, education… Many people died in de Gaulle’s colonial wars (Algeria, Indochine…) and fascist rule over here (eg. may 68 and de Gaulle’s fascist militias SAC beating down protesters). Is that your vision of communism?
For a more detailed argument on this topic, i strongly recommend Emma Goldman’s There is no communism in Russia (1935):
If you remember Marx, communism is the stateless, classless society. The dictatorship of the proletariat is supposed to be a step on the road to communism: neither Stalin nor Mao have taken any steps to go beyond the dictatorship of the proletariat and actually build communism (as in, all power to the people), and they have in fact repeatedly taken steps to ensure power and resources would not be redistributed to the people: by crushing the soviets with nationalizations or by crushing dissents with the Red Army (Cronstadt, Ukraine commune, Prague uprising…).
When did I say it was socialism? You need to read things more carefully in general, but you need to read carefully the point I was responding to where you said “Russia has privatized everything after the collapse of the USSR.” Nationalization of Gazprom doesn’t make Russia socialist, but it contradicts what you’re saying which is why I bring it up.
Why would a 87 year old source be relevant to what is going on today? Are we really going as far as to say the Soviet Union wasn’t communist? Really?
I remember enough of Marx to know he never said that “stateless, classless, moneyless” quote everyone keeps using. It’s a definition that was used to describe what the final stage of communism might look like, and it comes from people who studied Marx later, not sure exactly where.
“We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” is how Karl Marx actually describes communism. If you mean communism as the final stage of communism, we can’t say what it is, because it does not currently exist, nor has it ever existed.
And neither have you. Neither have any ultra leftists. I don’t see why anyone should abandon Stalin or Mao when they have accomplished far more for socialism than any of their detractors.
Yes. Since your argument seems to be based on USSR was communist, Putin is the direct descendant of the USSR so Putin is communist. I’ve been focusing on debunking the second assertion but if that’s not enough i’m happy to tackle the first one. There was a communist revolution in Russia/Ukraine in 1917, and the bolsheviks crushed it. There was no communism under the USSR after that, only State capitalism. It’s very relevant to this discussion because “invading ukraine” is precisely part of what destroyed communism in the USSR.
Yes it’s a paraphrase. But to be fair some of Marx’s own wordings are fairly close. I don’t remember those i read previously (from books he published later in his life), but for what it’s worth from exactly 5 seconds of “googling”: “this dictatorship is only a transition to the dissolution of all classes and leads to the formation of a classless society.”
Of course it has. Communism (or anarchism) is a quasi-natural state of things in many circumstances (see also Graeber on this topic). Most communities throughout the history of humankind have lived without what we understand as private property or work, and millions of people live to this day in self-organized communities without rulers. These people are practically building communism without intermediate steps or broken promises, or even political police: they are accomplishing a lot more than Stalin or Mao ever did who just reproduced the structures of the old Empires and painted them red (which has arguably nothing to do with communism).
I agree that communism will lead to a return to this natural human state. There’s a reason why we use the word revolution. When we talk about a revolution of the earth around the sun, it is the earth returning to the same position it was a year ago. That’s what a revolution is, an instance of something revolving, which implies an eternal cycle.
But of course, the earth doesn’t really return to the same place, because the sun is moving too. So it’s more of a spiral. That’s one of the main ideas of dialectics: everything is in motion, all change is connected. So even if we can narrowly contrive a useful picture of the earth in an eternal cycle, in the big picture, something has still changed. History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.
So the point of this ramble is to say that while there will most likely be a lot of similarities between this final stage communist society and primitive communism, they are not the same thing. What’s ironic is that the end of primitive communism and the beginning of this final communism are both events driven by the same thing. An overabundance of commodities.
When this happened the first time, it gave rise to the institution of private property, because people now had something worth protecting and stealing. In the future, overabundance will lead to the dissolution of private property. Because everyone’s needs and desires can be met the institution of protecting one groups desires over an other’s will be redundant.
So already we see a key difference. Primitive communism existed because of scarcity, the communism of the future exists because of overabundance.
I’m not sure what you are referring to because you could be referring to a lot of different things. Maybe the Zapatistas or Rojava? I guess not Zapatistas because they have leaders. But Rojava only exists in the context of a civil war and a state of anarchy which also allowed far right groups like ISIS to flourish. And Rojava is also financially backed by the US government. But maybe I assume too much and there is a different example you have?
No that’s not my argument. Putin isn’t a communist. What I said more specifically was that Russia is a popular front like China was during WWII. China wasn’t communist during WWII, but the communists were a strong faction in alliance with the others in China. Because there is a contradiction between the country and the imperial ruling class that is principal. The contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the working class is secondary at the moment.