this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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well socialism has the proletariat as the ruling class, this is true in Marxism & anarchism even if anarchists word it differently
The party leaders are not proletarian, but rather become part of a class of privileged bureaucrats.
there's a trend towards that, which can be combatted & has been by communist parties. Stalin had a pretty incoherent plan to combat rightist tendencies within the communist party, assuming the problem stemmed from external meddling. Mao actually shared your view in that bureaucracy rots socialism, and that it needs to be decreased as the people are helped towards being self reliant, ready to self manage the economy & have suitable industry to run the country with. that's why the cultural revolution happened, to fight bureaucracy
And yet in spite of the few positive things contributions Mao made, and some of the things he got right, he still positioned himself culturally to take up the position 'benign and distant emperor. Much as the contemporary regime prefers to pin all the horrors of the Cultural Revolution on the Gang of Four, many of Mao's ideas themselves were harmful (such as wholesale and universal destruction of old culture).
Marxism-Leninism and its party structure has shown itself, in practice and historically, as being unable to resist this impulse to corruption and autocracy. It was Bolshevik counterrevolution that destroyed the power of the Worker's and Soldier's Soviets in Russia, Soviet counterrevolution that invaded Ukraine during its revolution, and then again Leninist party counterrevolution that prevented any of the (few) positive aspects of the cultural revolution from blossoming into anything useful.
Vanguard parties are counter productive, and counter revolutionary. The French revolution gives us the same lesson, as the Jacobin counter-revolutionary terror (with the oh-so-popular guillotine mostly used on the poor) created the space for reactionary backlash.
The centralization of power is, therefore, a counter-revolutionary impulse. Humans being are not suited for the rule and management of others. Only a revolution that truly returns power to the people has any chance of lasting. That's why even the flawed and imperfect Kurdish revolutionaries of Rojava are sustaining the social and cultural infrastructure for revolution, while Marxists, Maoists and other authoritarian communists world-wide consistently either degrade into bandits and terrorists, or form corrupt and reactionary power-structures.
This is such a based comment. Good analysis and very well said.
The proletariat are by definition the majority. The Soviet Union was by no means ruled by the majority. Stalin murdered millions to enforce his autocracy—the exact opposite of majority rule.
just to chime in with an anarchist perspective-- majority rule, as lionized by proponents of liberal democracies, is itself a form of heirarchy in which the will of an ostensible 'majority' (though usually that of the capital- owning class actually) is inflicted upon society as a whole, alienating the minority position, enforced by the state apparatus' monopoly of violence.
if one values bodily autonomy, reconciled with the needs of the collective, a system of governance like mutual collective determination must be established which guarantees that all voices are heard and acknowledged.