A really great book that goes into this is Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti btw. Breaks down a lot of things that simply didn’t work in the USSR. Definitely check it out
Side question — what sort of world would you like? Not presupposing anything, or leading a question. Actually asking—what kind of structure do you think is best based on what you think humans deserve/could do?
We won't have any realistic solutions to international issues like climate change, wage/chattel slavery, and the protection of basic human rights until an international institution has the power to affect those changes.
So the question is: How does humanity enact an international representative government?
Do you think an international body with a variety of ideological perspectives, some capitalist, some centrist, some communist etc, could solve those problems
Well I think that situation would define winning for communists, sure. Personally I think if there was an international body where all parties were anti-capitalist, who then could control resource management and development of the world via a system of dispersed democratic committee from the bottom up, that would be the only thing that could save our planet from mass extinction, and also the only thing that could create social structures that don’t allow for worker exploitation. But in my mind there’s a lot of folks who would consider themselves leftists who are not anti-capitalists. Which, clock ticking, what do we do? I’m curious if we have enough time to continue the decades and decades of capitalist-communist argument that’s gotten us to where we are now, if that argument would move us forward through time still without changing economic structures, you know? Cause capitalism is the current mode of production. So that’s gonna continue until it’s stopped. What’s gonna stop it?
If anything a more authoritarian power structure and less "political pluralism" could have seen it still going strong to this day and I say this as someone who is generally critical of vanguardism and socialist personality cults. The failure of the August Coup and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Much better examples of the dangers of power concentration and vaguardism are the Sino-Soviet split, which was at least in part driven by Mao and Kruschev's personal dislike of each other, and the terror tactics the Bolsheviks used in the late 1910s to establish dictatorships of the proletariat (from which they excluded peasants) in overwhelmingly peasant dominated areas.
That being said, while there are valid criticisms to be made of the Bolshevik revolution and USSR policies, they were better for the world and the people of Russia than what came before them, what came after them, and 90% of other nation states that existed at the same time as them. While you can point to some things they maybe could have done better, it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have overthrown the Russian Empire, that they should have imitated the rapacious capitalist imperialist looting of the rest of the world the EU & USA wholeheartedly engaged in, or that it was a good thing the USSR capitulated into the neoliberal shock therapied protofash mafia disaster of a state that is modern Russia.
...yes, and?
The USSR failed because it did not tolerate any political pluralism, and lept from crisis to crisis based on the whims of personality cults.
I guess if you like personality cults...
Well, it is true.
Doctrinaire politics reigned from on high in the USSR which forbade even alternative ideologies of communism.
would you by any chance be american?
A really great book that goes into this is Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti btw. Breaks down a lot of things that simply didn’t work in the USSR. Definitely check it out
nooooo if they read that they'll be able to own me so easily
Side question — what sort of world would you like? Not presupposing anything, or leading a question. Actually asking—what kind of structure do you think is best based on what you think humans deserve/could do?
We won't have any realistic solutions to international issues like climate change, wage/chattel slavery, and the protection of basic human rights until an international institution has the power to affect those changes.
So the question is: How does humanity enact an international representative government?
I wish I knew the answer to that.
Yeah I agree. Are there shortcomings of the Internationale you consider?
Yeah, it excludes non-communists.
Not everyone is a communist.
Do you think an international body with a variety of ideological perspectives, some capitalist, some centrist, some communist etc, could solve those problems
It is better than the alternative.
Do you really think communists will win out if all ideologies except one are excluded?
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Well I think that situation would define winning for communists, sure. Personally I think if there was an international body where all parties were anti-capitalist, who then could control resource management and development of the world via a system of dispersed democratic committee from the bottom up, that would be the only thing that could save our planet from mass extinction, and also the only thing that could create social structures that don’t allow for worker exploitation. But in my mind there’s a lot of folks who would consider themselves leftists who are not anti-capitalists. Which, clock ticking, what do we do? I’m curious if we have enough time to continue the decades and decades of capitalist-communist argument that’s gotten us to where we are now, if that argument would move us forward through time still without changing economic structures, you know? Cause capitalism is the current mode of production. So that’s gonna continue until it’s stopped. What’s gonna stop it?
class traitors
The USSR failed because the US State department lead by Hillary Fucking Clinton succesfully couped them.
If anything a more authoritarian power structure and less "political pluralism" could have seen it still going strong to this day and I say this as someone who is generally critical of vanguardism and socialist personality cults. The failure of the August Coup and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Much better examples of the dangers of power concentration and vaguardism are the Sino-Soviet split, which was at least in part driven by Mao and Kruschev's personal dislike of each other, and the terror tactics the Bolsheviks used in the late 1910s to establish dictatorships of the proletariat (from which they excluded peasants) in overwhelmingly peasant dominated areas.
That being said, while there are valid criticisms to be made of the Bolshevik revolution and USSR policies, they were better for the world and the people of Russia than what came before them, what came after them, and 90% of other nation states that existed at the same time as them. While you can point to some things they maybe could have done better, it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have overthrown the Russian Empire, that they should have imitated the rapacious capitalist imperialist looting of the rest of the world the EU & USA wholeheartedly engaged in, or that it was a good thing the USSR capitulated into the neoliberal shock therapied protofash mafia disaster of a state that is modern Russia.