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It's kind of a half-and-half situation. On the one hand, Marx anticipated communism rising up through society organically from the proletariat, whereas in most
by smacktoward 7y ago
It's kind of a half-and-half situation.
On the one hand, Marx anticipated communism rising up through society organically from the proletariat, whereas in most communist countries it was instead imposed in top-down fashion by a so-called "vanguard party" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism).
Vanguardism was a feature of the Leninist approach to communism, and Lenin had not-terrible reasons for preferring it -- namely that by the 20th century, people had been waiting more than 50 years for communism to bubble up organically the way Marx had predicted it would way back in the 1840s, and it never seemed to, you know, happen. Lenin argued (in What Is To Be Done?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F) that Marx was wrong in this regard, that the only way the working masses would ever embrace communism was if a narrow, elite activist class first educated and agitated them.
Vanguardism worked, in the sense that it resulted in the creation of formally communist governments, which waiting for Marx's prediction to come true had never (and still never has) done. But it also tainted those governments (which were of course staffed top to bottom with members of the vanguard party) with a strong sense of their people as cattle who needed to be herded by their betters, which then made it easier to abandon democracy, shutter the free press, and murder lots of people whenever they got in the way of the next five-year plan.
On the other hand, complaints by communists that existing communist governments weren't practicing Real Communism™ always had a whiff of no-true-Scotsmanism about them. Most countries with these governments were pretty miserable places to live, so they weren't exactly great advertisements to people who lived elsewhere for the idea that they should embrace communism themselves. So people who advocated for communism had to somehow find a way to assure people that the communism they were preaching wasn't the same thing as the system down the road that couldn't feed anyone and was riddled with secret police. Accusing the folks down the road of deviationism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviationism) was a useful way to do that.
- claudiawerner 7y ago>So people who advocated for communism had to somehow find a way to assure people that the communism they were preaching wasn't the same thing as the system down the road that couldn't feed anyone and was riddled with secret police. This is a very cynical view, and does a disservice to the spirit of intellectual pursuit in normative social theory. The idea that the only reason why they would oppose such examples of communism is out of embarrassment doesn't fit well with their actual criticisms and reference to Marx himself. Thorough examination of Marx's notebooks and ancillary works only began in the 60s in English language literature. Your suggestion makes even less sense when one considers that the modern left critique of capitalism (usually focusing on concepts such as domination and totality) could be (and were) equally applied to the USSR. This takes a much different form to deviationism. Deviationism is a result of party politics. It isn't a result of theoretical work. For example, many of the criticisms I mentioned in my other comment in this thread have not come from Trotskyists, Maoists, Titoists or any other "-ist"!
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago>The idea that the only reason why they would oppose such examples of communism is out of embarrassment I was thinking it was more that the X I believe in is good, Y is bad but says they are X I better devote some resources to explaining why Y is not X lest people get the wrong idea.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agocool, if he had made a probably shorter point along these lines as to why he will consider these societies that called themselves Communist as being such despite others saying they weren't I would not be questioning anything. although as claudiawerner suggests below there are other reasons for finding the statement about Marxist thought not handling the collapse of these Communist companies to be factually inaccurate.
- theseadroid 7y ago>Vanguardism worked, in the sense that it resulted in the creation of formally communist governments, which waiting for Marx's prediction to come true had never (and still never has) done. Would you consider that the Nordic countries are growing communism organically albeit how rudimentary it is?
- simonh 7y agoThe Nordic countries are very much capitalist social democracies. There’s nothing communist about them.
- Mediterraneo10 7y agoSweden and Finland saw peak socialism decades ago. Neoliberal governments have rolled back many policies for workers and these countries are not so much different than other Western European states now.
- dnautics 7y agoIt's also worth noting that Benjamin Tucker predicted vanguardism as a natural consequence of Marxism back in 1888.