My roommate has been educating himself on communism, and we have been having many great conversations on theory and what have you. He says he is a communist. However, he has come to some very different conclusions to me, and I have been going back and forth on his talking points a lot. I was wondering what you guys would think of his talking points since I have to hear them and discuss them with him a lot.
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Vanguardism/council republics are inherently flawed and undemocratic. He admits that there is democracy within a Marxist-Leninist government, but says it is not good enough because you don’t vote directly for the president, etc…
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Says that vanguardism is “elitist” and that the core of the idea is that the working classes are stupid and only the intelligentsia knows right. He said he liked Lenin but he was too “mean” and didn’t speak as kindly of the peasants as he wanted. (lol)
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Attributes the fall of the USSR entirely to the democratic organization of the government. Says that if the Soviet Union had allowed a more “libertarian” “democratic” structure what happened wouldn’t have happened. I’ve also notice he attributes a lot of China’s problems historically to the way their government is structured.
That phase is called idealism and comes from a lack of any sort of analysis. It is an entirely contrived, utopian solution “to which reality will have to adjust itself.”
There is no ideal Marxist form of democracy other than the form which suits the conditions at hand.
It also comes from a lack of any sort of grounding in actual praxis or history. Without seeing how ideas interact with reality we just end up debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.