Nah, people who support authoritarianism can’t be leftists or communists by definition. Marx defined communism as stateless. There’s no such thing as a communist who supports the state.
The stateless communism is the end state and I think many authoritarian communists still (at least claim to) believe and want that, but they are fine with authoritarianism of one sort or another while building towards that end goal. Marxism-Leninism is like that I believe.
There’s a lot of currents of communism and leftism that are fine with authoritarianism as a “temporary necessity” or some other justification like that. I think both Marx and Engels wrote about that.
I feel like left-wing is similar sort of vague grouping as right-wing that it incorporates both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian views and ideologies.
Marxism-Leninism isn’t about authoritarianism, the idea of a vanguard party composed of intellectual revolutionaries that guides the broader people to revolution, isn’t authoritarian in and out of itself, as much as anticommunist leftists try to smear it. It’s about understanding the usefulness of centralization and coalition in a wide front that shows unity in action. That doesn’t go against democracy.
But their actual plan for the socialist state “withering way” amounts to pixie tears and fairy dust. People who theoretically want leftism but have no plan of action to achieve it are just liberals.
But their actual plan for the socialist state “withering way” amounts to pixie tears and fairy dust.
A lot of people say that about communism in general. There’s quite a few prominent leftist ideologies that are utopian and I wouldn’t use that to claim they’re not actually leftist.
People who theoretically want leftism but have no plan of action to achieve it are just liberals.
I don’t understand how that would make it liberalism. That’d just make them impractical or utopian or maybe even half-baked but I see no reason to claim they’re not leftist. “Leftist” isn’t a guarantee of quality in itself, after all. It’s just a vague grouping of very distinct ideologies.
I’m not entirely sure about this one but wasn’t Marx’s ideas also at least somewhat without a proper plan of action since it was rather a vision of things to come than a guide?
What a ridiculous and reductionist thing to say. Marx and Engles strongly and frequently criticized anarchists, instead taking the position that after the revolution, the state would need to be maintained under a “dictatorship of the proletariat” at least until the social conditions that created it had been changed, at which point it would gradually “wither away.” Of course the end goal is a stateless society, but it’s plain as day in his writings and his opposition to anarchists that he believed it was necessary to use the state to achieve the necessary conditions for that end goal. Regardless of what you think of it, that’s just a historical fact.
Except for the part where he didn’t actually believe in a communist revolution until his later years when he saw the failures of the vanguard. Hey, we’re not all born perfect, we have to learn from experiences.
Nah, people who support authoritarianism can’t be leftists or communists by definition. Marx defined communism as stateless. There’s no such thing as a communist who supports the state.
The stateless communism is the end state and I think many authoritarian communists still (at least claim to) believe and want that, but they are fine with authoritarianism of one sort or another while building towards that end goal. Marxism-Leninism is like that I believe.
There’s a lot of currents of communism and leftism that are fine with authoritarianism as a “temporary necessity” or some other justification like that. I think both Marx and Engels wrote about that.
I feel like left-wing is similar sort of vague grouping as right-wing that it incorporates both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian views and ideologies.
Marxism-Leninism isn’t about authoritarianism, the idea of a vanguard party composed of intellectual revolutionaries that guides the broader people to revolution, isn’t authoritarian in and out of itself, as much as anticommunist leftists try to smear it. It’s about understanding the usefulness of centralization and coalition in a wide front that shows unity in action. That doesn’t go against democracy.
But their actual plan for the socialist state “withering way” amounts to pixie tears and fairy dust. People who theoretically want leftism but have no plan of action to achieve it are just liberals.
A lot of people say that about communism in general. There’s quite a few prominent leftist ideologies that are utopian and I wouldn’t use that to claim they’re not actually leftist.
I don’t understand how that would make it liberalism. That’d just make them impractical or utopian or maybe even half-baked but I see no reason to claim they’re not leftist. “Leftist” isn’t a guarantee of quality in itself, after all. It’s just a vague grouping of very distinct ideologies.
I’m not entirely sure about this one but wasn’t Marx’s ideas also at least somewhat without a proper plan of action since it was rather a vision of things to come than a guide?
What a ridiculous and reductionist thing to say. Marx and Engles strongly and frequently criticized anarchists, instead taking the position that after the revolution, the state would need to be maintained under a “dictatorship of the proletariat” at least until the social conditions that created it had been changed, at which point it would gradually “wither away.” Of course the end goal is a stateless society, but it’s plain as day in his writings and his opposition to anarchists that he believed it was necessary to use the state to achieve the necessary conditions for that end goal. Regardless of what you think of it, that’s just a historical fact.
Yeah, Marx was a fool sometimes.
Fool or not, he was, pretty indisputably, a communist who believed in using a state to achieve his goals.
Except for the part where he didn’t actually believe in a communist revolution until his later years when he saw the failures of the vanguard. Hey, we’re not all born perfect, we have to learn from experiences.
He… what? Sorry, but when exactly, by your estimation, did Marx become a communist?