I’m sure this has been asked before, so sorry if it was.

But from my very surface level understanding of this, communism is about workers collectively owning the means of production. If a dictator is controlling the means, do the workers really own them? To me it just seems like centralised capitalism.

  • AnarchoSnowPlow
    8·
    1 day ago

    As an addendum to 4 - state level power is also required to protect aspiring communist societies (socialists) from antagonistic forces with state level resources. If your state is not strong enough, you will be undermined into destruction by external forces, colonial powers that will use this “failure” as both propaganda and a method of appropriating your resources to further colonial projects.

    Also, as someone who lives in and was raised in the heart of empire, the amount of propaganda that we have ingested is unfathomable.

    It is good practice when you find yourself asking about any topic that may be deemed antithetical to a settler colonial project to thoroughly examine the sources of the information you’re basing your opinion on, and perhaps consider that while you may be a very intelligent and thoughtful individual, expertly crafted and ubiquitous propaganda can shape your opinion as well.

    • sculd@beehaw.org
      6·
      24 hours ago

      Yes. This is a very important point. The failure of the Paris Commune was very influential. Quoting Marx:

      While the Versailles government, as soon as it had recovered some spirit and strength, used the most violent means against the Commune; while it put down the free expression of opinion all over France, even to the forbidding of meetings of delegates from the large towns; while it subjected Versailles and the rest of France to an espionage far surpassing that of the Second Empire; while it burned by its gendarme inquisitors all papers printed at Paris, and sifted all correspondence from and to Paris; while in the National Assembly the most timid attempts to put in a word for Paris were howled down in a manner unknown even to the Chambre introuvable of 1816; with the savage warfare of Versailles outside, and its attempts at corruption and conspiracy inside Paris – would the Commune not have shamefully betrayed its trust by affecting to keep all the decencies and appearances of liberalism as in a time of profound peace? Had the government of the Commune been akin to that of M. Thiers, there would have been no more occasion to suppress Party of Order papers at Paris that there was to suppress Communal papers at Versailles.

      So, when Lenin started his revolution, he made sure that the proletariat would not make the same mistake:

      But two mistakes destroyed the fruits of the splendid victory. The proletariat stopped half-way: instead of setting about “expropriating the expropriators”, it allowed itself to be led astray by dreams of establishing a higher justice in the country united by a common national task; such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over, and Proudhonist theories about a “just exchange”, etc., still prevailed among the socialists. The second mistake was excessive magnanimity on the part of the proletariat: instead of destroying its enemies it sought to exert moral influence on them; it underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war, and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood-soaked week of May.

      While we might look back and say “why centralise power?” At the time of the revolution, the cost of failure is very high and the proletariat understands that their enemies will use every means to try to undermine them.