On lemmy.world I posted a comment on how liberals use ‘tankie’ as an invective to shut down dialogue and received tons of hateful replies. I tried to respond in a rational way to each. Someone’s said ‘get educated’ I responded ‘Im reading Norman Finkelstein’s I’ll burn that bridge when I get there’ and tried to keep it civil.

They deleted every comment I made and banned me. Proving my point, they just want to shut down dialogue. Freedom of speech doesn’t existing in those ‘totalitarian’ countries right? But in our ‘enlightened’ western countries we just delete you.

  • redtea@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    Unless you have a state which is fully, 100%, directly controlled entirely by the working class, then there will be working class individuals who have more power than others.

    Even then, some people will have more power than others. It’s not feasible or theoretically sound to have 7+ billion people equally control every aspect of society, even on a local level. The point of a class analysis is to see the world as comprised of classes. It defeats the logic to then treat each class as the separate individuals who comprise their class.

    Unless you have a state which has no monopoly on violence and no authority to make and enforce laws, then the individuals with power within that state have the power to oppress others who do not have that power.

    This is exactly what a state is for. That’s why revolutionaries need to seize it. Without that monopoly or authority, the revolution will be crushed. The need to seize control of the state is driven by the need to oppress the bourgeoisie and other forces of reaction.

    This is how China manages to execute billionaires when they step out of line – the working class controls the state, acting as a class.

    Unless you have a 100% unified, educated, omni-benevolent working class, then there will be those who have power to oppress others who will use it to benefit themselves at the expense of others and society at large.

    What will protect the working class from oppression is it’s ability to exercise class power, not it’s level of education or the ‘benevolence’ of others. As Mao said, ‘political power grows out of the barrel of the gun’. If a state is needed to exercise class power, there’s no option not to have one.

    The Haitian slaves didn’t need an education to overthrow their oppressors, they needed organisation. They got it. Then they won. They were indebted by the French after that. But how long would they have lasted without organising state power? European armies turned up quicker than you could blink. Without exercising class power through a state, a bill for compensation would’ve been the least of it.

    While I will grant you that there are people who can be trusted to wield power selflessly, honestly and with wisdom and who would give it up when it is no longer needed, there are definitely many people who cannot.

    The moment we do this is the moment we lose. Successful revolution does not, cannot, rely on handing over power to people who claim or appear to be benevolent. That’s how the USSR fell, betrayed by it’s own. Imagine if Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Ezhov, and others were given even more power – the project wouldn’t have lasted a day.

    A revolutionary state won’t succeed because power can be handed to a few trusted individuals. It’ll succeed because it remains committed to Marxism and maintains organisational discipline. Everyone must be removable whether they want to go or not. Individuals don’t get to decide whether they’re the right person for the job. They only get to decide whether to put their name forward or whether to accept a position offered after being head-hunted.