veganbtw

As the Nazis boot steps on my throat I'll be sure to be yelling about the tankies who annoyed me on a small site with 30k users

I've gone the other way with my thinking from pretty hard line Maoist to Anarchist in my middle age. I think your response is good for anarchists who are stuck in the theory of people who are long dead but not really my personal thinking and understanding, including living through a war, which I added towards the end.

I don't believe that the goals dictatorship of the proletariat is actually possible. I don't think that it will ever work and exists firmly in the imagination of thinkers from 100 years ago. I'm not an anarchist in the Bukharin sense, I'm an anarchist in the sense that I desire a way of life for all animals, including humans, that is anti hierarchical but simply do not believe these contradictions are resolvable in a knowable way. I believe that the future classless government-less system is desirable but that the pathway is not clear without Leto II-esque prescience thinking. If we get there from a MLM sense or some other sense matters not to me.

In Lenin's writing in State and Revolution it is absolutely is about transferring the mechanism of the state to the workers who then form a militarized proletarian "temporary" state to destroy the other classes. That is what the dictatorship of the proletariat is, a transfer of power from the Bourgois and capital class to the working class who then destroy the other classes to create a classless system. I don't think this is possible and that is the crux of the disagreement.

Essentially that there is no way that the dictatorship of the proletarian will ever be temporary and that even though he spends time talking about the evils of the bourgeois state and how it must be dismantled this dictatorship with its "vanguard" (which are just new elites) will necessarily form a new state that will also form self-preservation methods and never transfer to a workers run stateless system. Bakunin calls them a red bureaucracy and Emma Goldman writes about how the Bolshevik state simply replaced the old Tsarist state and became reformist and bourgeois in nature losing its revolutionary character in time. The crackdown of the Kronstadt rebellion was the first seeds of this nearly immediately after the October revolution. The anarchist response and alternative to the centralized state that Lenin believes is required is a decentralized system of worker self-management pods in federated councils and communes, not a top-down elite vanguard run dictatorship.

A lot of the disagreement comes from the understanding and lessons learned from the Paris commune. Lenin believes this is a prototype of a worker's state with recallable delegates, less red tape/bureaucracy and the removal of the existing state but Anarchists don't believe the lesson here is to just create another state, although I personally would argue a dictatorship of the proletariat is preferable to the dictatorship of capital we currently live in, we want more communes that work together. We don't believe the revolutionary character of the commune went far enough to actually destroy the existing state and instead tried to recreate it on a smaller scale.

The fact that liberals refuse to read just 100 pages of State and Revolution while insisting that they are having new ideas or that the political environment has somehow changed is by far the most frustrating thing about Lemmy comment sections. I'm an anarchist, someone smeared by Lenin in that book but at least I read it and understand. My disagreement is with the vision and form of the dictatorship of the proletariat and how we can build a new commune, not the need for revolution or insisting that somehow, some way after 175 years of the same discussion voting for reform will work.

I swear Americans have never read a book that wasn't Harry Potter in their lives.

Woah no, this take is wild. I was taught environmentalism was halal and required by god lol

They are racist though though. Non white people can still accept and prop up systemic white supremacy. Anyone who supports the US or NATO is doing this. I see it all the time among my family and friends who are not white. To leftists racism isn't just prejudice based on race, its prejudice based on race + the power in society to enforce that as a system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice_plus_power

You can even have it read to you by our very own @dessalines@lemmy.ml https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GrP0EVJkVE

American soldiers should absolutely be punished for brutalizing my friends and family, it is very earnest. These people are no different from Nazi storm troopers and they should pay for their crimes against humanity. Fuck them all. You are deeply unserious for giving evil people a pass. They killed MILLIONS of people

Yes

There's more in the source https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures