Isn't "authoritarian communist" kind of an oxymoron? 😂 like the whole point of communism is that there isn't a ruling class. I guess Russia and China were never really communist, just statist authoritarian right? I mean, the Nazis called themselves Socialist. They were nowhere near that

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (6 children)

well socialism has the proletariat as the ruling class, this is true in Marxism & anarchism even if anarchists word it differently

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The party leaders are not proletarian, but rather become part of a class of privileged bureaucrats.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.