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.
Oppression of whom?
Those without (or with lesser) power than the ruling class of the state. Abolishing the current state and replacing the bourgeoisie with proletariat workers merely creates a new bourgeoisie. Power corrupts, so it has to be diluted or entirely dismantled.
In other words: the bourgeoisie, they are the ones who would be oppressed.
No, it puts a new ruling class in charge of the state, it replaces the current bourgeois state to form a new proletarian state.
This is idealism.
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.
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.
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.
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. It is difficult (or impossible) to differentiate those people. Therefore, every time we empower an individual (or worse, a group) we are taking a risk. A state is that same risk, thousands of times, on a national scale.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What a cheap cop out. Look to history, look to sociology for explanation of this logic. That power corrupts is a material fact, reconfirmed every damn day. Power is a network of relations that creates and sustains the conditions for its own reproduction, which will start to deviate from the interests one represented in the beginning…
I have yet too see this, except for in individuals, which isn’t really sustainable for a political system. As marxists, denying your line of argument is truly shooting oneself in the foot, as there exists nothing more uninteresting than a socialist vision that cannot be clearly separated from a boring dystopia. Perhaps a better definition of a tankie would be someone who is not interested in marxist theory development, but rather the exercise of conservative, dogmatist circle-jerking.
I can’t speak for Kraus but I have something to add myself.
It’s only a cop-out if it’s interpreted in light of certain assumptions.
One of those assumptions is that by ‘idealism’, Krause meant that power does not corrupt. But that is a bizarre interpretation and assumption.
Idealism is to be contrasted with materialism, yes. But I don’t think Kraus was saying that power does not corrupt in the material world.
The phrase was said in the context of a discussion about states. The argument was that revolutionaries can’t trust or use states because the people who run them will be corrupted by their power. That’s idealism because it prefers an idea of the state based on a concept of bourgeois states over what the state would actually be under a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The fact that power corrupts is not a reason for arguing against the need for a state in securing a revolution. It is idealism to think so. With organisation and discipline, it doesn’t matter that power corrupts because the new ruling class will have to account for that in its constitution. A Marxist state that leaves room for people to use power in a corrupt way is doomed to failure.
Which countries does your “socialism” have?