Cowbee [he/they]

No problem on the FAQ! It’s a deceptive title, it’s extremely lengthy. I don’t really agree with it either, as I’m a Marxist, not an anarchist, but I know anarchists swear by it.

As for what I mean by asking in a place with more anarchists and communists, Lemmy.world is predominantly liberal. The communists are usually on Lemmygrad.ml, Hexbear.net, or Lemmy.ml, while the anarchists are generally on dbzer0 and Hexbear.net.

With a Lemmy.world account, on a Lemmy.world community, you are going to find the majority of upvoted comments are from non-communists trying to explain communism. For example, the top comment that showed up for me on the communism post was entirely off-base, to which I wrote a hopefully constructive response. These kinds of comments are upvoted on Lemmy.world because they reinforce the general “pro-left in theory, anti-left in practice” stance that is predominent here on Lemmy.world.

I think it’s useful for getting the ideas of non-communists, ie you have your dissenting opinions, but for a more well-rounded view I’d use Lemmy.ml’s Ask Lemmy community and with a Lemmy.ml account, as that way you can actually see Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml answers. Just my two cents!

This is a caricature of how socialism has functioned. In socialist states, people were compensated for their labor, and necessities were heavily subsized or otherwise free.

To the contrary of your depiction, the USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.

When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union. This expansion in humanitarianism actually carried onto the judicial system, documented by Mary Stevenson Callcott in Russian Justice, written in 1935.

Reducing the tremendous gains made by socialist countries to the whims of Stalin or Mao is extremely reductive. It means every single victory gained by the working classes, such as free healthcare and education, massive literacy campaigns, huge increases in equality among the sexes, and more were in fact the exclusive whims of their leadership. It also reduces all of their problems, struggles, and flaws to personal failings of their leadership.

This kind of analysis is very flawed, and gets in the way of analyzing what went right and what went wrong in existing socialism. Simply painting a prettier picture of socialism in our heads and rejecting all existing socialist projects for not measuring up to that picture means we will be hopeless when we run into similar problems when we ourselves begin building socialism.

In socialist societies, more dangerous jobs are usually compensated by higher pay or reduced working hours. Such was the practice in the USSR, as an example. The USSR was a top competitor in the field of science, managing to go from semi-feudalism to space in merely half a century, so the idea that socialism stalls progress is faulty.

In communism, when all of production and distribution have been collectivized, and the productive forces themselves have been sufficiently advanced, people still work for their own fulfillment and to obtain personal enrichment for still-scarce non-necessities.

If you want to learn about Marxism-Leninism, I wrote an introductory reading list you can check out.

I think if you’re asking questions about communism and anarchism, it makes most sense to ask those questions where communists and anarchists hang out, rather than communities that tend to be more liberal. For clarity, I’m a Marxis-Leninist that used to be an anarchist.

Anarchism is primarily about communalization and decentralization of production and distribution. Anarchists view the state as a monopoly on violence and an unjustifiable hierarchy, and so seek to establish horizontalist structures and production methods that are more local than interconnected where possible. Think community self-reliance, with minor trade between cells.

An Anarchist FAQ tends to be valued among anarchists as a good but lengthy intro.

They were and are fully Marxist-Leninist.

Yes, always have been.

This group is Marxist-Leninist.

That’s like a doctor saying that shooting a patient in the head was a success because they don’t have headaches anymore.

Doubling life expectancies, providing free and high quality healthcare and education, low-cost or free housing, full employment, reaching full literacy, democratizing the economy, defeating the Nazis, and taking a semi-feudal backwater to the pinnacle of scientific and technological development, even reaching space in a few decades, is not “shooting the patient in the head.” None of your accusations make any sense.

a party that seized control and maintained it’s grip on power with violence against the working class

No? Fascists, capitalists, and landlords are oppressed by socialists, but not the working classes. More fantasy on your part, it’s all vibes with you in the face of actual facts.

Lenin wasn’t trying to erase that transition to communism is gradual, but instead correctly identified that the beginning of that transition is revolution, which Marxists at the time had erased from Marx. Dialectical materialism posits that there are revolutionary leaps after quantitative buildups, the transition to socialism is the beginning of the next long gradual process of achieving communism. He did not “force it under authoritarian boot heel,” but instead was the leader of the bolsheviks, a mass party chosen by the working claases.

Contrary to your position, Marxism-Leninism has successfully established socialism in many countries, and is so widely adopted by leftists partially because of its practical success. It’s the western leftists that endlessly move goalposts to invalidate socialism outside the west that results in perpetuation of bourgeois narratives surrounding socialism as it exists in real life.

Honestly, your appraisal of Lenin and Marx makes it come off as though you haven’t actually read either. Have you?