• 1 Post
  • 7 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: April 17th, 2024

help-circle



  • “Everyone I disagree with is a bot.”

    Michael Parenti

    The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.


  • I think @Cowbee@lemmy.ml already covered these, or at least some.

    1. By state, communists mean a system that enforces the will of one class over the others. A stateless society is a synonym for a classless society. It doesn’t mean there’s no government.
    2. No socialist state has achieved communism in the past because it is necessarily a long-term project. You can’t simply go to bed one night in a capitalist state and wake up the next in a classless society. Certainly none will achieve it while imperialist states are still working to deny it. They are in a stage of siege socialism.
    3. “Autocrats.” That’s not how democratic centralism works; that’s how Western capitalist propaganda tells us it works. From a declassified 1955 CIA report:

      Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.

    4. No communist worth their salt ever talks about any sort of utopia. Marxists are materialists, not idealists. This is basic stuff.



  • Only admins can do site bans. What you’re seeing is a hacky/temporary feature of the upcoming Lemmy v19.4, of which lemmy.ml is running the pre-release: when an admin bans someone from the site (temp or otherwise), it also automatically bans them from any community they have ever participated in. Lemmy.ml has always been the “beta” instance for new releases.