My roommate has been educating himself on communism, and we have been having many great conversations on theory and what have you. He says he is a communist. However, he has come to some very different conclusions to me, and I have been going back and forth on his talking points a lot. I was wondering what you guys would think of his talking points since I have to hear them and discuss them with him a lot.
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Vanguardism/council republics are inherently flawed and undemocratic. He admits that there is democracy within a Marxist-Leninist government, but says it is not good enough because you don't vote directly for the president, etc...
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Says that vanguardism is "elitist" and that the core of the idea is that the working classes are stupid and only the intelligentsia knows right. He said he liked Lenin but he was too "mean" and didn't speak as kindly of the peasants as he wanted. (lol)
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Attributes the fall of the USSR entirely to the democratic organization of the government. Says that if the Soviet Union had allowed a more "libertarian" "democratic" structure what happened wouldn't have happened. I've also notice he attributes a lot of China's problems historically to the way their government is structured.
Regardless of your opinion on the outcomes, I don't understand how studying these revolutions "doesn't work". Should we dismiss the French revolution with no investigation?
Both the Russian and Chinese revolutions succeeded in seizing the state, defeating the armies of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, and surviving their attempts at sabotage and terrorism. How did they do so? What can we learn from these decisions? What might we have to do differently with our different circumstances?
If you think the revolutions failed, what caused them to fail, and what specifically should the parties have done differently? And we need concrete answers to the real problems they were trying to solve, not idealist hand waving.