• Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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    11 hours ago

    Well, since you insist on distorting history, I’ll leave you with Soviet Democracy for historical record on the democratic structure of the USSR. The Bolsheviks carried out the revolution and created the first Socialist state. It certainly wasn’t Anarchist, but it was Marxist and thus counts as Socialist.

    As for MLs being “counter-revolutionary,” I don’t know how you make the claim that the only Marxists to succeed in revolution are somehow “counter-revolutionary.” Seems you have a martyrdom fetish, the second Leftists succeed they cease to be Leftists. Blackshirts and Reds is a good critical account of the USSR.

    I have no clue why you think the tiny subsection of western Marxists that make up “council communists,” popularized a century ago and promptly abandoned due to having horrible theoretical analysis, are “modern Marxists.” Marxism-Leninism is the most common and successful form of Marxism by far and is the guiding ideology of several Socialist states today, like Cuba. Unless you’re trying to say that only Westerners can truly understand Marx, and that the millions of Communists in the Global South that have spent their lives building Socialism are simply incapable of grasping Marx, then there’s no reason to think council communists are much of anything. Personally, I think we should look to those who actually have succeeded in revolution to see what they have to say.

    As for management, management needs authority, to deny that fact is to deny QA workers the ability to exert authority over production if the products are toxic, or to deny the health and safety officials the authority to stop unsafe production, or education officials to maintain standards for engineering education. Relying on every single decision to be democratically held would grind production to a halt in a day and to not do so is to recognize authority as necessary. If you agree that some people should be voted to have this necessary authority, then congrats, you agree with Marxist-Leninists.

    I think it’s clear enough to anybody else by now that you really have no clue what you’re talking about with respect to Marxism, I’ve made my case so I think we are done here.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      10 hours ago

      As for management, management needs authority,

      It is often said that Anarchists bow, on the matter of boots, to the authority of the bootmaker. But, truth be told: If they make shoddy shoes, no we don’t. Good managers don’t order people around, they organise. They are servants to the collective project.

      every single decision

      Strawman. I don’t care how the shoemaker affixes the sole, what matters is that it makes sense in the context of the end-product being a shoe that fits. I may not be able to figure out how to construct a good shoe, but I can judge the result by virtue of having feet. It’s the same with management. One problem tankies, particularly of the so common Yankee persuasion, have I think is that corporate culture is so utterly broken in America that they can’t even imagine working under good management. Thus you get the slave thinking that the only way out is for themselves to become the master, and then history repeats. The master/slave dialectic is already a diagnosis, building onto it, also as inversion, just further neurosis.

      Well, since you insist on distorting history,

      You can deny the power inversion the Bolsheviks caused all you want, how the selection for council positions was done such that an on-paper bottom-up organisation became in practice a top-down one, but it won’t change the actual history. The purpose of the system is what it does and what the Bolshevik counter-revolution did was to put people like Stalin and Beria into power, riding on the back of the easily abusable power relations that Lenin created, which I grant at least had ideals. The same power relations which, after the dissolution of the USSR, allowed banditry to fill the power vacuum.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        2 hours ago

        You genuinely believe if you change the name of something, you change it materially. Your admission that there needs to be management is an admission of authority’s necessity in controlled contexts. To trust the bootmaking factory to be safe, have controlled QA, to be practicing safe environmental practices, all aspects of mass industry require at some level administration and management. The QA worker must have a backed authority to halt production of boots with toxic materials, the safety workers must have the authority to ensure proper lock-out tag-out is followed, the maintenance workers must be able to have authority to halt production to fix machinery.

        Describe how a smart phone would be made in Anarchism, and you’ll find you need some form of authority and administration to ensure safety, quality, and coordination of logistics.

        It is not that Marxists simply can’t imagine a better society. Marxists understand that Capitalist production evolved the way it did, and when you cut out non-productive labor it did so to maximize profits along highly complex production methods. What needs to change is the method of ownership and direction, rather than being at the whim and for the profits of few individuals, production can be owned and run by all for all.

        As for the USSR, as you say, the purpose of a system is what it does. It doubled life expectancy from the 30s to the 70s, over tripled literacy rates to be higher than 99%, ended famine, dramatically lowered wealth disparity while improving median wages, democratized the economy, rapidly expanded housing, supported national liberation movements in countries like Palestine, Algeria, Cuba, China, and more. They provided free, high quality education and healthcare. Their presence on the world stage, combined with working class organization internally, was the driving force beyond the major expansions in social safety nets in the 20th century, and after the dissolution of the USSR these have been withering.

        No, you don’t have to be a Marxist if you don’t want to be. No, the USSR was not perfect, and no Marxist claims it to be either. Marxists simply claim that the USSR was the world’s first Socialist state, and as such the very real working class victories were due to the working people that built them. I’m going to go ahead and link Blackshirts and Reds again so if you want to read a history book written after the soviet archives opened up, you can.