Griping About Politics

[Chulanowa]

It sounds like the other thing I was told is right at least- put five Communists in a room and you'll get seven answers to what Communism is. :-)

Everyone's pretty concrete on what "communism" is, the argument is mostly over what route to get there. 

If it helps any, the definition I had in my head from that long-ago conversation was that "Maoist/Stalinist" ideals were essentially pro-authoritarian, that a revolutionary minority forcibly imposing a socialist state and concentrating all power into a small group was a good and necessary step along the road to communism. Meanwhile "Marxism" held to the opposite, that a successful socialist uprising needed willing mass support from the proletariat, and that concentrating the power simply created a new bourgeois/elite caste - in this case, the Communist Party/Chinese Communist Party itself - who would have no reason to relinquish their control.

So, kind of sounds like you learned this stuff from an anarcho-communist. 

Lemme go point by point...

•  "Maoist/Stalinist" ideals were essentially pro-authoritarian No one outside cartoon villains is "pro-authoritarian." Especially since, as I mentioned in an earlier thread, "Authoritarianism" almost always means "when I dislike this particular exercise of authority." Marxism-Leninism simply recognizes the inevitability of "authoritarian" actions. You're not going to have a revolution without oppressing the bourgeoisie. That's "authoritarian." You're not going to rebuild after a revolution without people directing the project, which is going to involve turning down ideas that aren't going to work - which is "authoritarian." You're not going to preserve the revolution without suppressing reactionary elements seeking to undo the revolution, whether inside or out - that is also "authoritarian." Any organized society is dependent on exercise of authority, which gets labeled as "authoritarianism" when someone dislikes or disagrees with that use of authority. Like right now our lad Forsaken is probably on some right-wing forum calling Vekseid an "authoritarian" for banning him (again.) 

•  that a revolutionary minority This is an attempt at describing Vanguardism, and isn't, strictly speaking incorrect. Though the Bolsheviks certainly didn't invent the idea of the Vanguard Party (that appears to have been Kautsky), they are most famous for it, and since they succeeded, it's generally thought of as a Marxist-Leninist idea. Which fine by me, because it makes sense. The idea of a vanguard party is simply that a revolution needs leadership, people to organize, direct, and manage. And while yes this is usually going to be a self-selected group, there's two things to consider; one, you're probably not going to hold an election in the middle of a revolution, and two, you can't be a leader unless people decide to follow (ask Trotsky.) 

Personally speaking, it's my experience and involvement with Occupy Seattle that really knocks this idea home for me, and later seeing how the "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone" went in the same city. Without informed and capable leadership, any movement - revolutionary or otherwise - ends up being a bunch of people shitting on the lawn and buying merch from grifters, who will be easily enough dispersed by enemies of the movement, leaving no lasting effect behind. The anarchist idea of spontaneous self-organization is as silly as the libertarian "invisible hand of the free market" and is mostly an excuse to not put in any of the necessary work (Which hey, it's hard and high-stress work organizing large groups of people, I don't really blame anyone for not wanting the job. I sure don't! Another lesson - not every socialist imagines themselves as the spearhead of revolution, lol) 

•  forcibly imposing a socialist state I mean like... yeah, that's what a socialist revolution does. That's why we say "revolution is inherently authoritarian," because it's literally one group (the proletariat - or perhaps peasantry, ideally both) imposing its will against another group's (the bourgeoisie) wishes. Even if you were to somehow elect your way into socialism, the bourgeoisie would not simply yield and cede their properties and power and influence, and instead would react with violence, necessitating a forcible revolution anyway. And for the record, this is why most socialists, not just Marxist-Leninists, snort and chuckle at the liberal obsession with electoralism as a panacea to the ills of the world.

• concentrating all power into a small group That's where power already resides. Except it's smaller, and absolutely unresponsive to the people it has power over. Again, more chuckling over electoralism. But more to the point, power isn't "all concentrated into a small group" under a socialist system. That's not to claim it's perfectly distributed either, but it is given a much broader spread than under a capitalist system. 

Back to China, just for an example that's applicable to most socialist states; do you have any notion of how Chinese elections work? You're probably aware that the President of China (who is currently, but not always, also the Chairman of the Communist Party of China) was elected by the National Peoples' Congress, which is, in terms of China's population, a pretty small group of people (2,977 people, still the largest legislative body in the world.) The National People's Congress is itself elected by peoples' congresses of China's provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions, e.g., the Guangdong People's Congress. The PC's of those regions are themselves elected by the peoples' congresses of the divisions below them (So Guangdong's Peoples' Congress is elected by the Peoples' Congresses of its 21 Prefectures; the Shenzhen Prefecture's People's Congress is elected by the Peoples' Congresses of its nine Districts, which are divided into even more subdistricts, which then hold direct elections to send to the district PC.)

Now obviously a member of the National Peoples' Congress does have more power than some guy selling noodles out of a closet in Yantian. Power is not distributed evenly. But that power is acquired through a long career of proving yourself capable to the people you're a representative for, over multiple tiers of administration. It's literally a system designed to reward service to the governed.

Does it function perfectly? Of course not, any system that's run by people is going to have all the flaws that come with those people. But it does in fact 'grind finer" than much of its competition - a thug like Donald Trump would never be considered for a county election, much less work his way up the ranks to be a serious contender for the presidency in China. but in the US all he has to do is host a TV show, throw money into ad campaigns, and then get a 0.01 plurality of the national vote

So while power is unequally distributed, this is because more power is progressively given in trust over several stages of representative democracy - people elected by people who are elected by people who are elected by the people. And in China's particular case, I'm pretty certain that it'd have to be this way - can you imagine a direct democracy of one and a half billion people?!

•  good and necessary step along the road to communism Well all taken together, yes. Basically all of this amounts to "there needs to be strong organization." And if that applies to painting a wall mural then it absolutely applies to a revolutionary reordering of society.

•  Meanwhile "Marxism" held to the opposite This is where I start to get the notion your buddy's running on some AnCom fuel. Marxist theory isn't contrary to Marxism-Leninism. That's why it's called Marxism-Leninism. Marxism is foundational. The difference is that Marxism-Leninism incorporates eighty more years of thought and experience onto that foundation. The main distinction between foundational Marxist theory and Marxism-Leninism is that Marx didn't really talk of anything like vanguardism, and instead wrote in broader, general strokes - that is he posited that there would be a proletarian uprising under fully-developed capitalism, but didn't try to lay out the form it would or should take. Just that it was an inevitable outcome of capitalism. Sort of like how Mao Zedong Thought is mostly an incorporation of agrarianism onto the idea of a proletarian revolution with a vanguard. 

•  that a successful socialist uprising needed willing mass support from the proletariat Well that's just common sense. Of course a successful socialist revolution needs popular support. This isn't any sort of point of contention, except if one assumes that there could never be popular support for a different model of socialism. Which would be a really goofy thing to claim.

•  and that concentrating the power simply created a new bourgeois/elite caste Well as noted, centralizing power is actually rather essential to management of societies and as a rule of thumb, the larger a society is, the more centralization is needed for it to function. Even our anarcho-communist friends understand this, though they'll never use terms like "hierarchy" or "authority" or "power" (instead preferring terms like "structures" and "influence" and "leadership," to describe exactly the same goddamned things). The idea of communism is reaching a point where that's no longer the rule, where society can function more or less autonomously, or at least with a minimal of central authority. Of course getting to that point - essentially functional anarchism - is bound to be a bumpy road (think of what a mess the transition from feudalism to capitalism was.)

• in this case, the Communist Party/Chinese Communist Party itself - who would have no reason to relinquish their control. This becomes a pretty strange argument when you think about it. First off, what's the timetable, exactly, for the party to "relinquish control?" Second, what does the party have control over, and how much, really. And third... if that were the goal, then why fucking bother with socialism at all?

That last point's actually a big one. Let's consider the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Even by Marxist-Leninist standards, North Korea is, er... strict. Almost to parody levels. It's not entirely undemocratic, but it's also not very democratic at all. The reasoning given for this tight-fistedness given by the Worker's Party of Korea is mostly due to the unresolved war with the south, the global superpower that has clearly chosen a side, and the fact that China is, at best, an unreliable ally. Now I dunno how much stock should be put into  that reasoning, relative to the level of repressiveness evident in North Korea... but I do know that whenever north and south Korea start talking about thawing relations, the US steps in to scuttle the effort... so I don't think NK's reasoning is entirely baseless. 

But the thing is, if Kim Jong Un and his politburo simply wanted to hold absolute power, for the sake of having absolute power and enriching themselves at every Korean's expense... they could just swing to capitalism and do it much easier, with far less risk, and vastly more personal gain. They wouldn't have to cede a drop of power - in fact they could entirely abolish all vestiges of democracy and rule as absolute monarchs, so long as they let BHP Group Limited mow down all their mountains for the mineral resources in there. Look at the al-Sauds, repressive absolutist monarchs living in luxury beyond most imagining, the precious pocket princes of most world powers, free to saw apart dissidents as they like without any more  than a mild harrumph from the liberal capitalist states they've aligned with. instead Kim appears to live a life of luxury enjoyed by the average upper-middle class American. Which is better than many, and most in his nation, but not exactly a pinnacle of opulence.

Honestly in many regards "they want power for power's sake" is a mindset of liberalism more than socialism. Liberalism is heavily hyperindividualist, so the idea of anyone having any positions or status above you is abhorrent, and the idea of actually trusting someone to have such power, willingly granting it to them, is genuinely absurd to liberal ideology. The whole point of liberalism is self-elevation over others, so the idea of seeking power for no reason other than to dominate others and achieve that station, and catapulting it to dominate even more people for even higher status  makes sense, and is what most liberals seek power for. The notion of a person seeking power because they genuinely want to improve peoples' lives is seen as quaint at best, or utterly alien more often - unless there's a follow-up of "but they were wrong, nothing can actually improve!" or "they were lying and actually had an evil nefarious plan all along!"
 

I knew there would be an immense degree of nuance beyond that, but it was the surface level impression I had of the divide - whether the authoritarian, totalitarian states imposed by Stalin and Mao and carried forward into the police state of modern China were positive inevitabilities along or corrupt deviations from the road to communism.

The "road to communism" is still uncharted. It's going to be a lot of advances and setbacks, and in truth, I'm not sure if any current socialist state is going to be "the guy." But I do think they're trying, and I think there's a lot to learn from for future attempts, as I said before. I mentioned the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and really, that whole process took roughly 500 years, and may in fact not even be fully realized. Why would the transition from Capitalism to socialism happen in less than a century?

I also wouldn't use phrases like "Positive inevitable" or "corrupt deviations." 

[TheGlyphstone]

The reason I asked was because this person also called himself a Marxist. Breaking up my paraphrasing into isolated soundbites has actually made me a little more confused than I was, but I appreciate you taking the time and effort regardless.

[Chulanowa]

The reason I asked was because this person also called himself a Marxist. Breaking up my paraphrasing into isolated soundbites has actually made me a little more confused than I was, but I appreciate you taking the time and effort regardless.

Sorry!

Did he also tell you we're prone to pedantry? :D It's true, it's all true, oh the shame!

[TheGlyphstone]

That's sort of what I was alluding to with the mention of five communists having seven different ideas of the 'right' way to achieve Communism - along with stuff like the Scottish Communist Party being a splinter offshoot of the Communist Party of Britain, which was a descendant/offshoot of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Y'all seem to have ideological schisms at the drop of a hat, which is why I found it plausible that one 'Marxist' could view secret police, re-education camps, collective responsibility, and Tiananmen Square as regrettable but necessary eggs to break while making the metaphorical omelette of socialism, while another 'Marxist' could see a society where 'Communist Party Members' have special privileges and higher standards of living than the average citizen, believe it was no different than a society where 'capitalists' have special privileges and higher standards of living than the average citizen, and conclude that the data showed this approach wasn't working.

[TheGlyphstone]

But if there's a multi headed No True Scotsman thing here where everyone says they're the actual Marxists and the rest are anarcho-commies, Maoists, tankies, etc., then I guess I'll never be entirely clear.

[Humble Scribe]

I remain completely unconvinced about how socialist that e.g. modern China and Vietnam are, and citing them as socialist success stories disguises the extent to which they abandoned socialist economic models in the 1980s. The fact that the ruling parties still call themselves 'communist' is misleading. They are both barely even socialist market economies these days. Deng Xiaoping and his friends, after all, invented the obscuritan phrase "socialism with Chinese characteristics" [those characteristics chiefly being 'making money'] and said "it is glorious to become rich". Even when I first visited Beijing back in 1994, everyone seemed to know the phrase "hallo, one dollar" for all of the tat they tried to sell you - including copies of the Little Red Book. Thirty years on, both China and Vietnam are thoroughly capitalist economies, albeit with high levels of state intervention in some strategic industries. But authoritarian capitalism is a well-trodden path for success - look at Singapore or the Arab Gulf, or indeed South Korea prior to 1987. I wouldn't want to live in those countries, as I value the ability to speak my mind, but it clearly works well enough for enough people for it to keep trucking along. 

"The country is poor therefore the leaders aren't in it for personal gain" is an interesting argument, but I don't buy that either. Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution replaced one parasitic class of corrupt oligarchs with another, and even if some of them were maybe originally in it for ideological reasons, most of Chavez' cronies seem to have been quite positively in it for what they could take for themselves. The Kims are a different kettle of fish, as they are in the Putin position that if they lost power they would be dog meat, probably quite literally, so keeping power becomes an end in itself. It's Game of Thrones with Korean Characteristics.

I was going to say that Chulanowa also seems to have a very generous view of Chinese domestic politics, but actually I don't think Chinese politics at its heart functions very differently from politics anywhere. Money, influence and ability all mix in the usual bearpit, it's just that the stakes are higher in authoritarian regimes as you may end up sent to a labour camp or shot as a profiteer (the modern equivalent of being denounced as a counter-revolutionary).