Politics and Alignment
GenderNihilismGirdle
Member Posts: 1,353
@GemHound
1. I could literally make an Alignment image macro with a different communist thinker for every alignment combination
2. Socialist and communist thinkers rail against liberalism all the time.
3. Conservatism is just a particular tradition of liberalism, Edmund Burke is the founder of the conservative tradition and he considered himself to be defending classical liberalism from the people who are considered by modern liberals to be the "real" liberals of his era, it was only people subsequent to Burke who liked what he had to say that applied the conservative label as distinct from liberalism to themselves, but if you take any Political Science courses or read deeply on the issue you'll find that even conservative political thinkers today largely acknowledge that they are writing within a tradition of liberalism.
4. Socialist and communist thinkers who rail against liberalism rail against the conservative strain of it hardest, but that does not mean they align themselves with liberalism. Only social democrats do that. Bernie Sanders, for example, constantly calls himself a democratic socialist, but he's actually wrong on that count as democratic socialists are people like the Polisario Front, whereas social democracy is like what you find in Northern European countries. Social democracy is not socialism, it is liberal democrat ideology that borrows from socialist thinkers without endorsing socialist precepts like opposition to capitalism.
I've got a degree in this, and can pull in a bunch of sources on all of this if you don't believe me, but I'll cap this here to suss out your interest in continuing the discussion. The long and short of it is that you seem to have a cartoonishly simple view of what communism and socialism are if you think communism = evil and socialism is somehow identified with liberalism, which it opposes. You can find quite a bit of information about what they are just by going on their wiki pages, but just as an example with communism, there are currents within it like libertarian communism and anarchist communism (mostly known as anarcho-communism) that are explicitly anti-authoritarian and don't consider the Soviet Union to be real communism because they reverted to a state capitalist form of economics which did not put the working class in charge but in fact oppressed them and deprived them of their voice in political and economic matters, which is an anti-communist thing to do.
So there's a lot more diversity in communist thought that you don't know about, and within that there are definitely very Good and Neutral stances to take, as well as Chaotic ones. People who see communism as Lawful Evil just haven't read much about communism except stuff written by liberals and conservatives who themselves also have not read much about communism.
1. I could literally make an Alignment image macro with a different communist thinker for every alignment combination
2. Socialist and communist thinkers rail against liberalism all the time.
3. Conservatism is just a particular tradition of liberalism, Edmund Burke is the founder of the conservative tradition and he considered himself to be defending classical liberalism from the people who are considered by modern liberals to be the "real" liberals of his era, it was only people subsequent to Burke who liked what he had to say that applied the conservative label as distinct from liberalism to themselves, but if you take any Political Science courses or read deeply on the issue you'll find that even conservative political thinkers today largely acknowledge that they are writing within a tradition of liberalism.
4. Socialist and communist thinkers who rail against liberalism rail against the conservative strain of it hardest, but that does not mean they align themselves with liberalism. Only social democrats do that. Bernie Sanders, for example, constantly calls himself a democratic socialist, but he's actually wrong on that count as democratic socialists are people like the Polisario Front, whereas social democracy is like what you find in Northern European countries. Social democracy is not socialism, it is liberal democrat ideology that borrows from socialist thinkers without endorsing socialist precepts like opposition to capitalism.
I've got a degree in this, and can pull in a bunch of sources on all of this if you don't believe me, but I'll cap this here to suss out your interest in continuing the discussion. The long and short of it is that you seem to have a cartoonishly simple view of what communism and socialism are if you think communism = evil and socialism is somehow identified with liberalism, which it opposes. You can find quite a bit of information about what they are just by going on their wiki pages, but just as an example with communism, there are currents within it like libertarian communism and anarchist communism (mostly known as anarcho-communism) that are explicitly anti-authoritarian and don't consider the Soviet Union to be real communism because they reverted to a state capitalist form of economics which did not put the working class in charge but in fact oppressed them and deprived them of their voice in political and economic matters, which is an anti-communist thing to do.
So there's a lot more diversity in communist thought that you don't know about, and within that there are definitely very Good and Neutral stances to take, as well as Chaotic ones. People who see communism as Lawful Evil just haven't read much about communism except stuff written by liberals and conservatives who themselves also have not read much about communism.
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Comments
Every freaking time. :v
They've also been a strain of communist thought since the 19th century, and people of that school of communist thought did oppose the authoritarian state capitalism of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc, etc consistently from before you were born straight through to the present day. I think the "every time" is you getting confused and conflating all kinds of communism together same as @GemHound was in the other thread. I know not everyone has a Poli Sci degree but it's not a hard concept to grasp.
The only difference is that their non-communist opponents are usually genuinely ignorant and not well read on communism, and the ML(M) types are usually well read enough on the subject that they tend to know perfectly well that they're shoving other, more liberatory forms of communism and anti-capitalism under the rug. It's ignorance vs arrogance, but neither side is somehow right about communism for being ignorant or arrogant.
And every ideology is "good" in it's prophets books. I know not everyone has a philosophy degree, but it's not a hard concept to grasp.
Not just Marx, but socialist thinkers that predated Marx were in opposition to capitalism, whereas Lenin himself states (here and here, for starters) that he was reverting some tentative moves towards communism of the early days to implement state capitalism, using double-talk to say it was somehow in service of communism.
And I don't have a philosophy degree, I have a Political Science degree. I also don't think anyone I like the works of is a prophet, nor does anything I say imply that. Not sure what you're trying to get at but it sounds like you're arguing with a concept of me that doesn't map to me and a concept of my arguments here that doesn't map to my arguments.
This part, I grant you, might be a bit more specialized knowledge but pronouncing your opinion on stuff you clearly aren't that well read on as though it's some kind of cynical read of factual information is disingenuous. Communists don't universally agree that those were communist experiments, and given that the guy who started the one all the other failures are modeled after called it state capitalism, you can see why avowed anti-capitalists might disagree that communism has been tried anywhere.
In Rothbard's books anarcho-capitalism is "good". And your brethren in fallacy will also argue that every time capitalism falls it's because was done by false Scotsmen. In Bakunin's books collectivist anarchism will be good. Therefore, D&D alignment system doesn't work - and will never work in the world with more than one apparatus of thinking.
Oh, ad personam ("you are stupid and you don't know communism, shut up!"), cool. Guess those false Scotsmen felt lonely, huh? If you are going to deny attempts at communism because it wasn't super-extra-150% pure Marx-Engels communism, then newsflash: there wasn't a single ideology that was introduced into any society. Zero. Null. And everyone can say "capitalism/fascism/anarchy/racism is cool, it would work if someone *actually* did it!".
Again, you keep trying to argue with some stance you're attributing to me that isn't me. I don't see what's productive about continuing if you're going to keep refusing to reply to what I'm saying.
From the meager amount I've read on him he seemed to create a functioning society under some form of the philosophical communist/socialist ideology (not perfect of course) but a damn site better than most of the USSR at the time.
a) is stricly pacifist;
b) sees that inequality as a reason to help those "lower races";
c) thinks that segregation is a best way to help them;
good or evil?
As for China, it went through a Chaotic Neutral phase during the Mao era (Mao wanted to revolutionize basically everything) then gradually transitioned to good old-fashioned Confucian Lawful Neutralism (largely due to Deng Xiaoping winning out over Hua Guofeng and other Maoist folks in the Party).
But China doesn't really fit the axis well. Traditional Chinese culture places a lot of importance on respect for authority, law, order, and hierarchy (LG/LN), and the state's top priority is stability followed by growth (LN/LG), yet modern China is also one of the places where the rule of law is weakest (CG/CN). Rules are often flexible (CG), many laws go unenforced (CN), and officials often have the ability to flat-out violate laws and get away with it (CE). There is a long-running search for order in an uncomfortably chaotic world.
That said, I'm not inclined to think any variety of Lenin-inspired models of state capitalist style communism have much merit given that they just replaced top-down, unelected capitalist authority in the economy with top-down, unelected "communist" authority in the economy. In each case you've got appointments by people who may be, in some sense, elected, but in practice are not democratic in any real sense for the workers themselves. And as Tito didn't deviate that much from a state capitalist model as Lenin had laid out, I'm not really big on what little I do know of Tito.
When I do comparisons of top-down authority to see which one treated people who shouldn't have had that authority over them slightly better, I find myself without much to say in favour of even the more benevolent dictators in the face of the lived realities of the people who had to suffer however small the percentage might be. I think it's less useful to compare leaders and jaw over which one was technically better than the others than it is to be looking at the material conditions of the people living under those leaders to see where people could have managed better if they'd had the reins of their own lives in their own hands.
And I apply that thinking across the board, from capitalist liberal democratic states to communist states to whatever, from politics to economics and beyond. The "Great Men" theory of politics should've died in the 18th century when Louis' head hit the basket in France, but it's still around and going strong in all kinds of political circles, a few of which have expanded it to include "Great Women Too" which is the wrong direction to go with political theory that antiquated and anti-democratic.
Even Great Leaders of Democracies style thinking misses the point of democracy, which is demos+kratos, peoples' power, and within political democracies we still haven't seen any forms of economic democracy take hold on large scales since Franco's fascists crushed the anarcho-syndicalist experiments in Spain the 30s (which were quite successful examples of horizontal, leaderless economic organization controlled from the bottom up until violently being destroyed). For me what's great about anarchist Catalonia is that there isn't really any Great Leader to point to, it was built collaboratively by regular people who dumped bosses off of their backs and moved forward together. Not that it was perfect either, but it was getting better all the time until Franco swooped in, and part of what allowed that continual improvement was not having some useless position above them eating up a bigger paycheque than everyone else and dictating to them how best to do what they themselves knew best how to do (since they were the ones doing it). Someone can kick back in their office after barking out orders, but the people who execute the orders often have a better idea of how to do things and what will and won't work, and Spanish anarchists proved that point in multiple sectors of industry in terms of increases in efficiency and productivity, better distribution between communities, etc.
That's what Lenin got wrong, he tried to execute a system which is based on putting trust and faith in the hands of everyone on paper and decided he didn't trust them or have faith in them in reality. It's also what capitalism gets wrong, IMHO, although on paper they don't trust people to be able to know best how to manage themselves either (despite study after study on the efficiency of worker co-operatives in capitalist countries showing that in fact people who co-own and co-manage the places they work with everyone else perform at worst at comparable levels and on average much better than their traditional top-down controlled competitors).
Like, one of the more significant goals of a Communist state is that it won't have any sort of single supreme leader at all.
Those examples are better used to illustrate some of the flaws of large-scale command economies.
I'm not even sure why anyone would think differently.
Also, for the record, pure communism has in fact been attempted. Mao did abolish private property and reorganize the entire country into individual communes in which people did work for identical pay, enjoyed identical accommodations, and ate the same food in the same communal kitchens without any class differences or any difference in material reward, just as Marx advocated. You can say that the violent paranoia of the Cultural Revolution, or the personality cult of Mao, or the belligerent militarism towards the Chinese Nationalists, was not real communism, but Mao's economics were indeed pure communism.
The lack of a supreme leader is not a major criterion for a communist state. Marx did not specify the kind of state he wanted; he focused on economics, and his criteria for a communist utopia was for (1) private property to be abolished, (2) the ruling class to be removed through force of violence (he was quite explicit that the revolution would be violent), and (3) everyone was to receive as much as they needed and contribute as much as they could. This is the society he outlined in the Communist Manifesto. Mao accomplished the first two objectives, but people were not willing to be productive without a material incentive (though there was a lot more behind the failure of the Great Leap Forward than that alone). Mao therefore attempted pure communism, and it did not operate as planned. Not that Mao ever lost faith in the idea; it was the rest of the Party that terminated the program.
Granted, we also had pure capitalism in the early industrial revolutions in Europe, before governments started to regulate businesses and enforce standards in factories. Much like pure communism, it wasn't great. Things improved when European businesses were subject to regulations. Things improved when Chinese people could start their own enterprises.
But neither communism nor capitalism are evil. They are just models that do not work well in their purest forms.
Mao did the exact opposite.
As I pointed out earlier, the Great Leap Forward did not entail a ruling class. That held true in the more organized Soviet Union, or the stratified DPRK, but not in decentralized, communalized Mao-era China.
Beyond (presumably) Mao himself and his entourage, nobody was filthy rich in China at the time, or enjoyed much power over others. You have to understand that virtually every moderately wealthy or moderately powerful person in China was beaten down or killed, and even Party officials could not amass wealth or attain power without being quickly accused of being a closet reactionary, which would lead them to the same fate. It wasn't possible to become a member of any ruling class until after Mao was gone. Even the country's top officials were not living it up.
I studied this period in graduate school, and I am not exaggerating in the least when I say that during the Mao period, gathering power or money was suicide for anyone besides Mao Zedong.
I cannot overemphasize just how comprehensive the revolution was. They stamped out hierarchy. Mao Zedong wiped out every trace of the ruling class. And no, the Chinese Communist Party did not take its place as the new ruling (until the Deng period, after Mao), because Mao and his Red Guards constantly and violently purged anyone who remotely resembled an elite.
The entire population dressed in gray peasant's clothes. From 1949 to 1976, especially during the 50s and 60s, everyone who had much money, or had much education, or had high status, or had much power--or just didn't look, act, and sound like a peasant--was dragged out of their homes, into the street, beaten senseless, and forced to recite self-criticisms until their spirit was broken or their body went cold. That's not the worst treatment; that was the standard treatment.
And this wasn't a one-time event, either. This was a constant reality of Mao's China. The revolution never ended. There was never a time when it was safe for a ruling class to arise. Not as long as Mao was around.
Imagine if every young person in your country dedicated their lives to killing every single rich and powerful person in the nation besides the president or PM, and humiliating and assaulted anyone who remotely resembled the rich and powerful.
Imagine if no one ever stopped them.
And they then turned on each other, killing anyone that gained any power or influence or money in the wake of the revolution.
And they kept doing this for 20 years.
Would there be any members of the ruling class besides the president or PM?
During the Great Leap Forward, you had extremely high economic equality. You did not have a ruling class; merely a ruling ideology. China was governed primarily by Maoist ideology enforced by mob rule at the time. Not by a powerful state or ruling class of any kind.
If you look at the societal structure in China and the model described by Marx, you only see a single difference, which is the cult of personality around Mao.
You might claim that a cult of personality disqualifies Maoist China from being truly communist. But Marx never warned against any cult of personality. So it's hardly a discredit to Maoist China's credentials as an authentically communist country that the country's most beloved figure was a die-hard communist revolutionary.
There are plenty of differences outside the cult of personality addition between Marx' oeuvre and Maoist China, but I want to focus on just the one: while Marx isn't explicit against cults of personality, he was adamant about working class people organizing their own life in concert with one another. While it's true that Mao tried to encourage this in ways that went above and beyond Lenin and Stalin, there was still massive oversight over workplaces from a standpoint of state instrumentalism that saw the state as a means of organizing distribution and production levels, and "the state" was a de facto dictatorship (of the proletariat, as Mao was following Lenin's line of thought and expanding on it in his own ways, but as with Lenin's it was "for the proletariat's own good" rather than "of the proletariat" on issues deemed too big to leave to the people).
There was also a stratified proletariat who couldn't be said to truly be united in their representation in the dictatorship "of the proletariat", largely along cultural and ethnic lines.
An example in Russia that carries over into China there are regions with ethnic groups who are largely Muslim. These were among regions that were called "autonomous" regions by Soviet leadership as well as Mao and subsequent administrations of China, but in practice their production was actually even more subordinate to national production in a way that, for example, core regions of white Russians and Han Chinese were not, and in instances of labour unrest of ethnic Russians or Han Chinese (generally coming from anti-capitalists unhappy with state management of production and distribution and in favour of federations of producers soviets/workers' councils that managed things from the bottom-up rather than the top-down) there was often a parallel to any relenting to labour unrest (usually strategic relenting to stall, since neither State ever did want to listen to proletariat who wanted to have control over their own economic lives directly rather than having that be mediated by the Party and the State) that had a corresponding addition of hours worked per day in periphery regions to keep up overall national production while trying to settle down core regional labour unrest. More than just those regions, as well, especially in areas colonized by the Tsar's Russia (an imperialist power that Lenin railed against until he was in charge of it and had a chance to decolonize those regions and withdraw, at which point resource extraction trumped indigenous rights that the Tsar was Evil and Bad for violating with his Empire of Core and Periphery...which became the core and periphery of an "anti-imperialist" empire lmao)
So while I do agree with some of what you say here, I don't think it's the whole picture, and a technocratic managerial class did in fact, even under Mao, dictate how production needed to happen and how distribution took place, and privileged some regions over others in a way hardly in line with communist critiques of empire. It might be true that Mao cracked down on that class to ensure they didn't accumulate wealth or become a "ruling class" per se (and under Deng Xiaopeng and later leaders it was from precisely this stratum, along with high-ranking military folks, that we see the bulk of capital accumulation happening and power brokers emerging which became the new ruling class, something plenty of imprisoned and executed Chinese radical left anti-capitalists from anarchists to socialists to anti-authoritarian communists tried to warn about even under Mao), but again that's not a proletarian communism cracking down from below, it's Party administration cracking down from above, and party administration was not, in practice, more controlled by the proletariat than by Mao and the cadres most intimately linked to him.
This is sort of like the Tito issue for me. Sure Mao got closer than Lenin, but I'm not a fan of either one of them for reasons of what they obstinately got wrong about communism, such as not trusting the working class to manage their own affairs on the macro level. Mao trusted the micro more than Lenin or Stalin did, but on macro issues he was just as tight-fisted and just as opposed to Chinese anti-capitalists who saw in his state a dangerous concentration of managerial power that didn't need to be there for the proletariat to manage themselves horizontally, which is how Marx laid out the way you can eliminate a parasitical class like the capitalist class: by not replacing any portion of their authority over working class people, since they already do all the work managers and bosses and elites direct them to do anyway, so they can do it even without parasites above them (and better). In that sense, I think even though a cult of personality isn't explicitly opposed by Marx, he'd have opposed more parasites above (though I do grant that, as you say, Mao tried to enforce a minimum of parasites on a level Lenin and Stalin didn't, mostly localized around his person).
tl;dr stamping out hierarchy without replacing it is one thing, but on many issues (and not just distribution and production level decisions, foreign policy jumps to mind immediately) the proletariat did not have control over political or economic power, despite having means to supposedly engage with that through engaging in self-criticism among equals (in practice, people advocating too much devolution of power to the proletariat proper on these issues of state the Party was managing in the proletariat's name didn't live very long, however nicely they framed their criticism)...but other than these points, I am much in agreement with you over the differences between the Soviet Union/North Korea on one hand and Mao's China on the other.