• alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
    911·
    5 months ago

    I’m not watching a youtube video.

    Did they build a system of oppression

    No, such a system already existed, evidenced by the famines, massacres, etc that happened almost yearly in China and Russia before the revolutions.

    What I’m getting at is that while the post-revolution states weren’t utopias, they were far better than what came before. Telling people otherwise only serves to prolong the status quo.

    Also they kinda did have a government ready to go in the case of the USSR, the Soviets.

    simultaneously shutting down the mechanisms by which workers could have power over their own lives

    Except they had and used those mechanisms, as evidenced by the massive improvements to the average person’s lives after the revolution.

    the absurd strawman that people think he did anything personally

    Apologies, typically when I see people doing anti-communism use the term dictatorial, they mean a single person exercising absolute power. Though I don’t understand why you’d consider a dictatorship of the working class “hell”.

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
      154·
      5 months ago

      There was no dictatorship of the working class. They defanged the Soviets - you know the workers’ councils that the USSR was named for.

      You don’t have to watch a video, here’s the script text for the entire series:

      https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-the-state-is-counter-revolutionary

      MLs love reading, don’t they? Oh but wait, that’s anarchism. Go ahead, tell me it’s beneath you and I should read On Authority. I have. It was underwhelming to put it nicely.

      And yes, the system they built was on the back of and patterned after the authoritarian monarchist regimes they followed. That’s not a favourable light to put that system in. Was it marginally better than a monarchy? Sure, why is that relevant to anything? We live under neoliberal regimes of which none to my knowledge has ever been toppled by an ML revolution.

      That ideology is centuries out of date. Anarchists saw its downfall before it started. It’s failed.

      Even if you’re combatting some bizarre strawman about absolute dictators, it’s equally bizarre that your response is to attempt to rehabilitate Stalin’s character. That puts you squarely in tankie territory.

        • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
          104·
          5 months ago

          Assuming you’re trying to ask what that term means, it’s short for Marxist-Leninist, it’s a polite way of referring to tankies, where you accept their rebranding of what is effectively Stalinism. It was after all Stalin’s term to coopt and puppeteer the legacy of two dead men to give legitimacy to his reign of terror. They will try to tell you there are principled MLs but if they think there is any merit in the concept then they are doing the same kind of historical revisionism that all tankies do.

          And you can see this person was in fact clearly trying to defend Stalin, if only indirectly.

          Edit: Also look at the username - they’re from lemmy.ml, where the .ml is the Mali country code but in this case it definitely also stands for Marxism-Leninism. It’s a tankie instance.

      • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
        73·
        5 months ago

        The way they feed you information is patronizingly slow, and while I’m not expecting a widely cited academic paper published in a reputable journal, Youtube essays are one step below shitposts on internet forums in trustworthiness and academic rigor.

        • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
          51·
          5 months ago

          Guess we’re watching different video essays, then. Most are edutainment at best, true. But there are *soy many with cited sources on youtube.

          • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
            3·
            5 months ago

            I gave them the text as published on the anarchist library, but they didn’t seem to appreciate that either. It’s almost like they just don’t want to learn history that isn’t their revisionist version of it.

              • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
                3·
                5 months ago

                The frustrating thing is that most of it was CIA propaganda at one point in time, it just happened to also be true, which made it much more effective propaganda. It’s a big gift the USSR gave to anti-communists.