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.
I’m not sure if anyone is getting angry that you’re saying the state must be abolished. MLs fundamentally agree with that. It’s what revolutionaries are aiming for.
The criticism is that you seem to be saying that revolutionaries cannot use the state because it’s an incoherent notion:
By this do you mean to say that the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat is logically contradictory? That it won’t work? You seemed to agree, above, that you don’t think that’s the case (i.e. you think the state can be used as a tool), but here you appear to be saying just that?
It may be helpful here to reiterate the dialectical element of Marxism-Leninism. It’s not a step-by-step sequence of events. First one, then the other. It’s a dialectical development.
The plan isn’t to seize the state, then to use the state to abolish classes. That won’t work. It’s anti-dialectical.
The idea is that by seizing the state and wresting control over the means of production from the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie will become redundant and whither away. This will take a long time. The state is needed to keep the reactionaries in line in the meantime.
It’s taken China over half a decade to start the process and most of the rest of the world hasn’t even begun the task yet. The DotP and the abolition of classes and the state are one process. They’re interrelated.
Have you read State and Revolution or ‘Better Fewer But Better’ by Lenin?