There’s such a thing as left wing authoritarianism too.
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Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 days agoYour last two paragraphs explain how they are actually right wing, because the authoritarianism has already happened and they still support it.
“Planned economy” is just state capitalism. It’s not better than neoliberal capitalism, it jist has a red flag, and tankies are fool enough to think that makes difference.
realitista@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
There’s such a thing as right wingers who coopt left wing rhetoric and fool people into believing they are left wing. But anyone who says authoritarianism is left wing because it has some supposedly liberatory ideals is - and tankies will hate to hear this - an idealist.
Bassman1805@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Joseph Stalin: famous right wing politician
naught101@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Surely there is a meaningful difference between a planned economy/command economy and a semi-regulated market economy? Like, I get that corporate control can still be authoritarian, but it’s different to state control in some ways, I think?
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
I didn’t say it was no different. You can tell because i used different words for the two things.
I said it was no better.
holo@lemmy.wtf 3 days ago
State capitalism isn’t a thing.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
Engels, Lenin and Bukharin all talked about state capitalism. Lenin decried it as “not real socialism”
the erroneous bourgeois reformist assertion that monopoly capitalism or state-monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but can now be called “state socialism” and so on, is very common
Lenin, The State and Revolution
That was until after the October revolution, at which point he seemed to think it was based and cool actually, and that it was definitely what the USSR was doing.
Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism in Russia, that would be a victory.
Lenin, Minutes of the Sessions of the All-Russia C.E.C., 4th Convocation. Verbatim Report
This is around the time he stripped the soviets of their power and disenfranchised the workers in favour of a central state that alienated them from control over the means of production.
You know, like a capitalist.
And now tankies are distancing themselves because they can’t square the circle that their beloved revolutionary heroes were actually capitalists, and they pretend the concept doesn’t exist.
So tell me, was Lenin wrong about this? If so, was he wrong twice? Why the flip-flopping on whether it was good or bad? Nobody seemed to dispute at the time that it existed, and an analysis of what happened shows that the USSR liberalised quickly. The bolsheviks were in effect liberal reformists.
holo@lemmy.wtf 3 days ago
That’s a hell of a gpt response and all, but no, state capitalism isn’t a thing and left wing thought has evolved in the last nearly 200 years. Except in the US.
Jimbo@yiffit.net 3 days ago
How in the hell is that comment anything GPT-like other than the fact that it’s slightly long???
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
Oh wow, you called me a bot and an American. Checkmate. No need to respond to anything I actually said, you obviously know how to get right to the heart of dismissing me so you can repeat your opinion without any actual argument.
volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 3 days ago
You’re taking things out of context. In the first example, Lenin specifically says “bourgeois reformist assertion”, he’s talking of monopoly in the context of a bourgeois state, not in a worker’s state. He understands that for as long as a strong bourgeoisie exists, not even a state monopoly can be considered socialist, because the state is in fact controlled by the bourgeoisie.
That was until after the October revolution
Wow, so you’re telling me that, when confronted with real situations and material conditions, the opinions of someone can change? Baffling.
This is around the time he stripped the soviets of their power and disenfranchised the workers in favour of a central state that alienated them from control over the means of production
Good luck fighting a civil war in which you get invaded by 14 other world powers for the sin of being a communist, while your industry is disorganized and not centralized towards the war-effort.
And now tankies are distancing themselves
Wait, so tankies are actually against centralized economic planning? Strawman
an analysis of what happened shows that the USSR liberalised quickly
“liberalism is when centrally-planned economy”. Seriously, do you know what “liberalism” means?
You know your REAL problem with the Bolsheviks? That they won. The problem YOU have with Bolsheviks, is that they had to face real historical and material problems, and big ones, and therefore had to make tough decisions. You claim to know better than the people of the time that spent their literal lives in jail or exile prior to the revolution, studying and theorizing and discussing about communism in real life, risking their lives in organizing the workers and in fighting against Tsarism, and you know why? Because the ONLY socialists that supposed “leftists” like you will support, are the leftists who failed. You’ll support Salvador Allende because he didn’t face the real conditions of his time and didn’t apply the necessary policy to fight the advance of fascism. You’ll support the anarchists in the Spanish Second Republic because they failed to fight against fascism and, because of rejecting taking power, they didn’t have to apply harsh policy to fight reactionarism. But you won’t ever support actual socialists who DID understand the dangers of fascism and of capitalist counter-revolution, and actually did something about it, because as soon as they apply their ideology to real-world conditions, they’re not perfect anymore. Because they ACTUALLY were a threat to the system, and so the propaganda will paint them as intolerable autocrats, and you’ll swallow that propaganda whole and share the same views of socialists than fucking Zbigniew Brzezinsky.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
At no point in any of this are you adressing the argument being made, which is that state capitalism absolutely is a thing, which means Lenin became a capitalist.
You can make excuses for it all day, the only difference between them and the liberal revolutions is ideological at that point, which makes you an idealist.
thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world 3 days ago
this is why left vs. right isn’t nuanced enough for real political discussion outside of a two party system
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
It’s why we can’t jist go around believing everybody who claims to be a leftist. We need to evaluate the actual effects of their actions. If they are oppressong the workers, they are not left wing.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
They were saying that there are more axes than left/right, and that the left/right axis is typically not one of authoritarianism.
See: libertarians and anarchocapitalists are absolutely right wing but are radically anti-authoritarian.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
Well, if we’re interested in the ideals of the people, then yes the political compass is a thing that you can use. The problem is that when you drill down into right wing “libertarianism” you find landlords and bosses. They are in fact about the freedom of coporations to own and control human beings. They are pro-slavery and neo-feudalist. That is not actually libertarian, that is pro-slavery. Right-wingers always are. So in practice, it’s just a lie.
Murray Rothbard himself said that “those who call us anarchists are not on sound etymological footing”. That’s a wanker way to say it, said by a wanker, but it’s clear he understood that words mean things.
naught101@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Labels never more useful than just as a shortcut to understanding someone’s whole nuanced belief…
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
Yeah, bit that’s what I’m doing. I am evaluating the beliefs of authoritarians of all kinds and concluding that they are right wing.
I’m not throwing out the labels, I’m saying this left-right-auth-lib pair of dichotomies is not useful.