Are Cuba and Vietnam considered good or bad? Nicaragua? How about the new coup leaders in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger? Any successful revolution has demonstrated the necessity of authority, to enforce an ideological will on society and stop the bourgeois class from re-appearing requires authority. Any revolution with be authoritarian, even and especially if it is the oppressed overthrowing the oppressor.
Sure, say you don't like China, the Soviet Union, or the DPRK for your own reasons, but why use a term that encompasses any successful revolution, as even the CNT-FAI was finding a need for things like secret police during the awful times of a revolution.
You should maintain your site culture, but there's a reason anti-communists and fascists use the term tankie as well, it's imprecise and volatile.
Edit: I apologize if this is not a post meant to invite discussion, I just don't see this perspective shared very often in these conversations.
Look I am sure many of those places have done great things, like China's recent wage cuts for rich bankers and pay rises for those lower on the totem pole, a good thing give credit where credit is due. But. How can you possibly remove the Bourgeois then place yourself at the top of the totem pole and not think of yourself as the new Bourgeoisie?
Yes every violent revolution is going to be authoritarian because you have lined people against the wall and you are not going to get every dissenter in the first round and unsurprisingly they are going to be pissed. So now you have a violent government and and a violent opposition, not exactly fun times for everyone stuck in the middle, Which once that happens is not just the liberals as many hexbears use as an insult for everyone not Auth-Left but basically the whole political spectrum that aren't on the far ends.
A benevolent dictatorship is going to be the absolute best form of government you could possibly ever have but. You are never going to have one. The people at the top want to be at the top, and the people who want to be at the top are always going to be bastards.
You think that Authoritarianism is needed to keep the revolution going. Definitely correct if you do it through a coup. I don't want to be under a nation that will silence me or worse because I criticise them. You can call that counter-revolutionary if you like but I would rather have incremental improvements where things get better slowly than everything is worse now and you just got to believe that things will get better, and our leaders plans will all just work out.
Tankie is a slur against Auth-Left. If you are Auth-Left well that's the slur people who don't like you are going to use.
To pivot on what this original post was likely created for (admittedly in a pretty bad way). Hexbear is full of some really crazy people who have very strong opinions and shout memes that make sense in Hexbear but don't really out of it. 90% of Hexbears just seem so unhinged. If I see someone from Hexbear it makes me skittish to actually start a discussion with that person as there is a high chance they are just going to be hostile.
That's a lot but I can try and address some bite size chunks!
Look I am sure many of those places have done great things, like China's recent wage cuts for rich bankers and pay rises for those lower on the totem pole, a good thing give credit where credit is due. But. How can you possibly remove the Bourgeois then place yourself at the top of the totem pole and not think of yourself as the new Bourgeoisie?
While it's true that in China specifically members of the CPC get many benefits in life as a result, the only true safeguard that can prevent this in reality is anti-corruption campaigns, something impossible to do if a simple bourgeois class was in charge. For example, as far as I can understand, Jiang Zemin's represented the "Shanghai Clique", which is very much like this. Shanghai tends to have a culture of liberalism and as a city prides itself on it's liberal approach to things, this is why Shanghai had a uniquely awful COVID lockdown last year as their liberal politics prevented them from doing what was bad for the economy immediately. In China, it's viewed that it's better to have these folks members of the CPC and fuck up sometimes with liberalism rather than allow them to become separatists and fall into enemy hands.
This is why the market policies of Deng's reforms nearly led to the fall of socialism under Jiang Zemin, corruption was admittedly very high and so was the view of CPC members as a sort of "second bourgeois". The only way this has been prevented is with real rollback and anti-corruption campaigns which have happened under Xi's presidency. During this period members of the CPC who have betrayed the common good have been given the kinda sentences they deserve, expulsion from the party and imprisonment or even the death penalty if their decisions allowed for great social harm. I can only link imperfect sources as of now as I don't have the time, but, here's an SCMP topic page on the topic.
To be clear, the only way that the communist party's members of a revolutionary nation can not become a "new bourgeoisie" is through vigorous anti-corruption campaigns, self criticism, and adherence to the mass line (a Democratic line to the people). The point is that it is not a permanent state, so it doesn't have to last forever, just that they have to keep it going for long enough to defeat capital. The CPSU failed at this, but the CPC is currently succeeding, and that's why their socialist nation has not fallen apart.
I'mma do this in mutliple comments as I'm in the shitter and my phone screen isn't that big lmao sorry
Yes every violent revolution is going to be authoritarian because you have lined people against the wall and you are not going to get every dissenter in the first round and unsurprisingly they are going to be pissed. So now you have a violent government and and a violent opposition, not exactly fun times for everyone stuck in the middle, Which once that happens is not just the liberals as many hexbears use as an insult for everyone not Auth-Left but basically the whole political spectrum that aren't on the far ends.
Actually liberal is something with a very precise definition, both inside and out if Marxism. The way we use it at the end of the day comes down to our views on ideology and class, or the "trashcan of ideology". Lenin defined ideology as an unreal thing, a big vague blob of ideas that's hard to pin down but at the end of the day results in the supremacy of one class over another. Liberalism is not merely the adherence to private property, believing in a free market, etc as those can all be very nebulous and have been shown to change in the past, liberalism is at the end of the day the ideology of the supremacy of the bourgeois class. Much in the same way if we still had monarchists or something their ideology would at the end of the day result in the supremacy of the aristocratic class (but scarce few really believe in that anymore).
So even an ideology that does not view itself as liberal, like fascism, would in our eyes be liberal because it is entirely all about the supremacy of the bourgeois class over every other. You may also hear us consider some anarchists as "liberal" as well because their ideas would, at the end of the day, not create something strong enough to truly lead to the liberation of the proletarian and peasant classes. This is not true of all anarchists, and I really appreciate those who are capable of the rigorous self criticism required, but many folks who get their start with radical politics in the global north go from the dominant ideology (liberalism) to something that is revolutionary but not enough to truly challenge the status quo (large swaths of anarchism). This was my path, and I eventually became an ML out of seeing the failure of real life organizations I myself was a member of.
Additionally, yes, most of what you're describing in the first part of this paragraph is a civil war, and those almost always happen when a socialist government comes into charge and always have, it's an unavoidable misery of the change we need immediately. Revolution is a bad and dangerous thing only soothed by the fact it will bring necessary victories to the working class, and there's no way around that.
Tankie is a slur against Auth-Left. If you are Auth-Left well that's the slur people who don't like you are going to use.
This betrays a sense that the political compass is a valid way to view the world. It isn't. The political compass was created by a libertarian as explicit libertarian propaganda, and those guys are more deluded than the LibDems when it comes to political reality. Auth-Left, is uh, not a thing. Nor is Lib-Right. The entire point of socialism as a project and it's historical examples have been to extend the will of the working class; that's the opposite of what "Authoritarian" has come to represent in popular mind. You should ask other hexbears on the history of the political compass as propaganda though, as I can tell you that it's nothing except a propaganda tool, but I'm not personally educated enough on it's history to give you a good refutation.
Isn't the only thing wrong with the political compass is that the questionnaire lies? I don't think it has ever gotten me right as it seems to just shove you to one of the 4 corners where I would suspect most people would actually just circle around the center point. I don't see anything wrong with adding an extra axis to the political spectrum, even if the questionnaire is bollocks. No simplified model is going to show nuance because well. it's simplified.
:D you have no idea how happy it makes me to read that. Thank you so much for listening to my humble posting, this really is truely the best lenses I've had to view the world through and I'm so glad I was able to pique your interest!
Isn't the only thing wrong with the political compass is that the questionnaire lies?
Not just the questionnare, but the entire framing it uses is flawed and is meant to be used to draw reactionary stances and positions from. The ideology is coming from within the compass!!!
Fuck goddammnit I wrote a whole ass thing and my phone died so here's the next best re-write of what I wrote fuck goddamnit.
A benevolent dictatorship is going to be the absolute best form of government you could possibly ever have but. You are never going to have one. The people at the top want to be at the top, and the people who want to be at the top are always going to be bastards.
Yeah that's true, that's why no socialist believes in a "benevolent dictatorship". We believe in a "dictatorship of the proletariat", a society in where the "proletariat" dictates society. It does not mean rule by one man, or rule by a special executive, no project could have survived as such with as many socialists among it's ranks. For example, today we live in a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" where the bourgeois class can dictate society's whims, but we desire a "dictatorship of the proletariat" where the proletarian class dictates society.
Even historically, we saw a bit of consolidation of power, but it was no match for the way that democracy was extended to society during those periods of time as well. Almost universally, except for Czechia, every single socialist project went from a thoroughly anti-democratic backwater to a democratic society. Batista's Cuba, Tsarist Russia, Fascist Poland and Romania, Yugoslavia, China, the imperialized lands of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, etc. These are all lands that were able to make a great leap forward in terms of democratic progress.
For more information on how the imperfect soviet democracy functioned, I recommend the book Workers' Participation in the Soviet Union. As opposed to being a stalinist backwater, in reality the Soviet Union was an imperfect but quite functional democracy which was capable of many things the United States even now finds itself unable to do.
China's history of Democracy is far too complicated and full of ups and downs for me to share just one book, the entire Cultural Revolution can be seen as an example of democracy being extended too far and spilling out into violence on the streets. This necessitated a kind of regression of democracy, which now has gone forward and progressed again into Whole Process People's Democracy. China changes far too often for me as an outsider to give an accurate record of what it currently is like on a whole (as every province does it a little different as well), but one thing I can share is that the thoroughly American institution of Harvard has even conducted studies on democratic satisfaction in China and found that 95.5% of people in China view the state of things as satisfactory or even good! Far better than the numbers we get here at the end of the day in the states.
Democracy in Cuba is still roughly according to how it was in this video. Things have been exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, and there's certainly issues that exist don't get me wrong, but it's still far more democratic than the United States by far.
I'm beginning to run out of steam and need to focus on other things in my day now so I may become less responsive lol
You think that Authoritarianism is needed to keep the revolution going. Definitely correct if you do it through a coup. I don't want to be under a nation that will silence me or worse because I criticise them. You can call that counter-revolutionary if you like but I would rather have incremental improvements where things get better slowly than everything is worse now and you just got to believe that things will get better, and our leaders plans will all just work out.
This debate of Revolution vs Reform has been had time and time again, these debates were solved 100 years ago. First off, Allende's Chile did what you were talking about in a global south country and he got couped within three years by the United States; this path of "social democracy" is only possible within the imperial core, so for the vast majority of humanity it's something locked off that as much as they struggled for it could not achieve it. All else I can share is this additional video by Azurescapegoat on how the social democracy as you describe it will inevitably fall apart and how it actively is in Sweden and many other European countries. The progress they gave was very small and now, with the Soviet Union gone, is being completely rolled back.
The only consistent way shown to enact progress is through the ML system, the only socialist system that's been shown to consistently result in progress. The Soviet Union went from a tsarist backwater to the nation that ended the holocaust and became the leader of the space race in under 40 years. Now, China has eradicated Extreme Poverty and become the world's leader in greenhouse reductions (despite needing to build up their economy themselves). As it's been shown, yes, ML nations are those that have been able to enact the kind of incremental change you desire and more importantly keep it.
Are Cuba and Vietnam considered good or bad? Nicaragua? How about the new coup leaders in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger? Any successful revolution has demonstrated the necessity of authority, to enforce an ideological will on society and stop the bourgeois class from re-appearing requires authority. Any revolution with be authoritarian, even and especially if it is the oppressed overthrowing the oppressor.
Sure, say you don't like China, the Soviet Union, or the DPRK for your own reasons, but why use a term that encompasses any successful revolution, as even the CNT-FAI was finding a need for things like secret police during the awful times of a revolution.
You should maintain your site culture, but there's a reason anti-communists and fascists use the term tankie as well, it's imprecise and volatile.
Edit: I apologize if this is not a post meant to invite discussion, I just don't see this perspective shared very often in these conversations.
deleted by creator
Look I am sure many of those places have done great things, like China's recent wage cuts for rich bankers and pay rises for those lower on the totem pole, a good thing give credit where credit is due. But. How can you possibly remove the Bourgeois then place yourself at the top of the totem pole and not think of yourself as the new Bourgeoisie?
Yes every violent revolution is going to be authoritarian because you have lined people against the wall and you are not going to get every dissenter in the first round and unsurprisingly they are going to be pissed. So now you have a violent government and and a violent opposition, not exactly fun times for everyone stuck in the middle, Which once that happens is not just the liberals as many hexbears use as an insult for everyone not Auth-Left but basically the whole political spectrum that aren't on the far ends.
A benevolent dictatorship is going to be the absolute best form of government you could possibly ever have but. You are never going to have one. The people at the top want to be at the top, and the people who want to be at the top are always going to be bastards.
You think that Authoritarianism is needed to keep the revolution going. Definitely correct if you do it through a coup. I don't want to be under a nation that will silence me or worse because I criticise them. You can call that counter-revolutionary if you like but I would rather have incremental improvements where things get better slowly than everything is worse now and you just got to believe that things will get better, and our leaders plans will all just work out.
Tankie is a slur against Auth-Left. If you are Auth-Left well that's the slur people who don't like you are going to use.
To pivot on what this original post was likely created for (admittedly in a pretty bad way). Hexbear is full of some really crazy people who have very strong opinions and shout memes that make sense in Hexbear but don't really out of it. 90% of Hexbears just seem so unhinged. If I see someone from Hexbear it makes me skittish to actually start a discussion with that person as there is a high chance they are just going to be hostile.
That's a lot but I can try and address some bite size chunks!
While it's true that in China specifically members of the CPC get many benefits in life as a result, the only true safeguard that can prevent this in reality is anti-corruption campaigns, something impossible to do if a simple bourgeois class was in charge. For example, as far as I can understand, Jiang Zemin's represented the "Shanghai Clique", which is very much like this. Shanghai tends to have a culture of liberalism and as a city prides itself on it's liberal approach to things, this is why Shanghai had a uniquely awful COVID lockdown last year as their liberal politics prevented them from doing what was bad for the economy immediately. In China, it's viewed that it's better to have these folks members of the CPC and fuck up sometimes with liberalism rather than allow them to become separatists and fall into enemy hands.
This is why the market policies of Deng's reforms nearly led to the fall of socialism under Jiang Zemin, corruption was admittedly very high and so was the view of CPC members as a sort of "second bourgeois". The only way this has been prevented is with real rollback and anti-corruption campaigns which have happened under Xi's presidency. During this period members of the CPC who have betrayed the common good have been given the kinda sentences they deserve, expulsion from the party and imprisonment or even the death penalty if their decisions allowed for great social harm. I can only link imperfect sources as of now as I don't have the time, but, here's an SCMP topic page on the topic.
To be clear, the only way that the communist party's members of a revolutionary nation can not become a "new bourgeoisie" is through vigorous anti-corruption campaigns, self criticism, and adherence to the mass line (a Democratic line to the people). The point is that it is not a permanent state, so it doesn't have to last forever, just that they have to keep it going for long enough to defeat capital. The CPSU failed at this, but the CPC is currently succeeding, and that's why their socialist nation has not fallen apart.
I'mma do this in mutliple comments as I'm in the shitter and my phone screen isn't that big lmao sorry
Actually liberal is something with a very precise definition, both inside and out if Marxism. The way we use it at the end of the day comes down to our views on ideology and class, or the "trashcan of ideology". Lenin defined ideology as an unreal thing, a big vague blob of ideas that's hard to pin down but at the end of the day results in the supremacy of one class over another. Liberalism is not merely the adherence to private property, believing in a free market, etc as those can all be very nebulous and have been shown to change in the past, liberalism is at the end of the day the ideology of the supremacy of the bourgeois class. Much in the same way if we still had monarchists or something their ideology would at the end of the day result in the supremacy of the aristocratic class (but scarce few really believe in that anymore).
So even an ideology that does not view itself as liberal, like fascism, would in our eyes be liberal because it is entirely all about the supremacy of the bourgeois class over every other. You may also hear us consider some anarchists as "liberal" as well because their ideas would, at the end of the day, not create something strong enough to truly lead to the liberation of the proletarian and peasant classes. This is not true of all anarchists, and I really appreciate those who are capable of the rigorous self criticism required, but many folks who get their start with radical politics in the global north go from the dominant ideology (liberalism) to something that is revolutionary but not enough to truly challenge the status quo (large swaths of anarchism). This was my path, and I eventually became an ML out of seeing the failure of real life organizations I myself was a member of.
Additionally, yes, most of what you're describing in the first part of this paragraph is a civil war, and those almost always happen when a socialist government comes into charge and always have, it's an unavoidable misery of the change we need immediately. Revolution is a bad and dangerous thing only soothed by the fact it will bring necessary victories to the working class, and there's no way around that.
This betrays a sense that the political compass is a valid way to view the world. It isn't. The political compass was created by a libertarian as explicit libertarian propaganda, and those guys are more deluded than the LibDems when it comes to political reality. Auth-Left, is uh, not a thing. Nor is Lib-Right. The entire point of socialism as a project and it's historical examples have been to extend the will of the working class; that's the opposite of what "Authoritarian" has come to represent in popular mind. You should ask other hexbears on the history of the political compass as propaganda though, as I can tell you that it's nothing except a propaganda tool, but I'm not personally educated enough on it's history to give you a good refutation.
I've been advised by comrades that this is a good refutation which goes over everything I could possibly hope.
Well. it seems I have a lot of reading to do.
Isn't the only thing wrong with the political compass is that the questionnaire lies? I don't think it has ever gotten me right as it seems to just shove you to one of the 4 corners where I would suspect most people would actually just circle around the center point. I don't see anything wrong with adding an extra axis to the political spectrum, even if the questionnaire is bollocks. No simplified model is going to show nuance because well. it's simplified.
:D you have no idea how happy it makes me to read that. Thank you so much for listening to my humble posting, this really is truely the best lenses I've had to view the world through and I'm so glad I was able to pique your interest!
Not just the questionnare, but the entire framing it uses is flawed and is meant to be used to draw reactionary stances and positions from. The ideology is coming from within the compass!!!
Fuck goddammnit I wrote a whole ass thing and my phone died so here's the next best re-write of what I wrote fuck goddamnit.
Yeah that's true, that's why no socialist believes in a "benevolent dictatorship". We believe in a "dictatorship of the proletariat", a society in where the "proletariat" dictates society. It does not mean rule by one man, or rule by a special executive, no project could have survived as such with as many socialists among it's ranks. For example, today we live in a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" where the bourgeois class can dictate society's whims, but we desire a "dictatorship of the proletariat" where the proletarian class dictates society.
Even historically, we saw a bit of consolidation of power, but it was no match for the way that democracy was extended to society during those periods of time as well. Almost universally, except for Czechia, every single socialist project went from a thoroughly anti-democratic backwater to a democratic society. Batista's Cuba, Tsarist Russia, Fascist Poland and Romania, Yugoslavia, China, the imperialized lands of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, etc. These are all lands that were able to make a great leap forward in terms of democratic progress.
For more information on how the imperfect soviet democracy functioned, I recommend the book Workers' Participation in the Soviet Union. As opposed to being a stalinist backwater, in reality the Soviet Union was an imperfect but quite functional democracy which was capable of many things the United States even now finds itself unable to do.
China's history of Democracy is far too complicated and full of ups and downs for me to share just one book, the entire Cultural Revolution can be seen as an example of democracy being extended too far and spilling out into violence on the streets. This necessitated a kind of regression of democracy, which now has gone forward and progressed again into Whole Process People's Democracy. China changes far too often for me as an outsider to give an accurate record of what it currently is like on a whole (as every province does it a little different as well), but one thing I can share is that the thoroughly American institution of Harvard has even conducted studies on democratic satisfaction in China and found that 95.5% of people in China view the state of things as satisfactory or even good! Far better than the numbers we get here at the end of the day in the states.
Democracy in Cuba is still roughly according to how it was in this video. Things have been exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, and there's certainly issues that exist don't get me wrong, but it's still far more democratic than the United States by far.
I'm beginning to run out of steam and need to focus on other things in my day now so I may become less responsive lol
This debate of Revolution vs Reform has been had time and time again, these debates were solved 100 years ago. First off, Allende's Chile did what you were talking about in a global south country and he got couped within three years by the United States; this path of "social democracy" is only possible within the imperial core, so for the vast majority of humanity it's something locked off that as much as they struggled for it could not achieve it. All else I can share is this additional video by Azurescapegoat on how the social democracy as you describe it will inevitably fall apart and how it actively is in Sweden and many other European countries. The progress they gave was very small and now, with the Soviet Union gone, is being completely rolled back.
The only consistent way shown to enact progress is through the ML system, the only socialist system that's been shown to consistently result in progress. The Soviet Union went from a tsarist backwater to the nation that ended the holocaust and became the leader of the space race in under 40 years. Now, China has eradicated Extreme Poverty and become the world's leader in greenhouse reductions (despite needing to build up their economy themselves). As it's been shown, yes, ML nations are those that have been able to enact the kind of incremental change you desire and more importantly keep it.