this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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The point of the Lumpenproletariat isn't that they're subhuman, it's that they lack cohesiveness as a class or revolutionary potential.
Well - here’s the thing with “lacking revolutionary potential” and a dear-leader mindset.. anyone dear leader deems lacking is labeled lumpen and thrown to the furthest gulag or has their rights removed and confined.
Eg in Stalinist Russia certain groups like the Roma, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Koreans or homosexuals were labeled as such wholesale.
In modern times the Uighurs need reeducation etc.
I'd argue none of those were people's revolution, and in none of those cases did the people seize the means of production. All of those cases were vanguard parties claiming to act on behalf of the people, which I view as a wildly different thing than the people themselves.
I don't see those as communist because they immediately reject the Marxist notions of rule of the people. Vanguard parties are inherently not of the people, as I see it.
And again, I am stupid and uneducated, so you're probably gonna have to talk slow and avoid jargon for me to get it.
I mean while i agree with the premise of that argument this sounds a lot like ‘no true Scotsman’… which instances do you see as being in the true spirit then?
I'll jump in. European Democracies that are taking care of their people are the furthest along.
Because that's how you get to true communism.
The pitfalls on the path are the same that any democracy faces. Mostly authoritarians seizing power.
Vanguard parties are also a threat on the path to communism. Lenin participated in one election, and lost. So he seized power and created a new feudalist state, and then called it communism.
Prosperity through colonialism and imperialism is our greatest hope. \s
Post WW2 European Democracy. The colonialism mostly didn't survive the colonizer having all their cities firebombed, often repeatedly. Most of the stolen prosperity burned. Not that every European country actually took part in the Colonialism,
And even then, half of the continent was then ruled by a totalitarian dictator, and were themselves exploited as colonies of Moscow. And the ones that were free lived in somewhat constant fear of being invaded by their somewhat insane neighbor.
But the key is, the people who wrote the post WW2 constitutions, wrote in stuff that made them more solid democracies than had existed before, what with many of them still being monarchies prior to a pair of devastating wars.
Lessons have been learned about the mathematical structure of democracy.
I believe that the true key to communism is extreme democracy. Every man, woman, and yes, child, should have a voice in government, and that voice should matter. And yes, the European Democracies are closest to that goal. Especially with the creation of the EU.
Closest, but nowhere near there yet.
None? I dunno. Maybe it is a bit of the Scotsman fallacy or maybe I'm just too idealistic, but I don't have an on-hand example of a true people's revolution led only by the people yet. But I assume a lot of that is due to overwhelming power of capitalism and their incentive to immediately quell anything that resembles it, whether through violence, or compromise, or allures of wealth, more than the impractically of the thing happening.
I don't have all the answers here, and I think it seems there needs to be some kind of catalyst to unify the working class in such a massive way, and while I'm uncertain what that catalyst is I don't vibe with the "ends justify the means" approach of a vanguard that seems to me so antithetical to communal nature of my limited understanding of Marxism. I keep trying to understand it but it always comes back to me to a "they don't know what's best for them" mentality and then what's the fucking point, we're just trading one subjugator for another.