thethrilloftime69@feddit.online 1 week ago
Man I actually read Lenin and now this thread is making me question what I know. I guess theres what Marxist philosophers say and what is considered in the modern usage.
Marxists say that communism is the ultimate end point. A stateless classless moneyless society. Something so different from our understanding of society as it is currently conceived. I think Ursula K Le Guin probably best imagined what this might look like in “The Dispossessed” (she calls herself an anarchist, but I think this what Marx himself envisioned). Where the way labor roles are divided up by the needs of the group and the choices of individuals. Socialism is said to be the transition state from capitalist society into a communist one. Where the machinery of capitalism is no longer used for the benefit of individuals and is used for the benefit of all. Marx imagines that a society that uses it’s tools for the good of all will naturally evolve into a communist society.
Then there is the modern usage of the terms which seem to vary based on who invokes the them. For example, Republican politicians will use the term socialism to mean communism and vice versa. Some politicians like Mamdani or Bernie will describe socialism to mean a more humane type of capitalism that has other priorities other than pure profit seeking. Some people use communism to describe an authoritarian system that has no regard for human agency. I’m not an expert on this particular topic, but I think this thread is proof that multiple people will have multiple definitions that most often don’t align with how Marxists describe communism and socialism.
I think part of the problem is the history of the Soviet Union. It billed itself as a communist society, even tho it never really achieved anything described as a stateless classless moneyless society. I think at best it probably achieved a form of socialism. Guy Debord(who is a Marxist philosopher) criticized the Soviet Union for creating a new type of class without intending to do so. So a lot of people today hear the Soviet Union call itself a communist country, and so that’s the popular misconception of communism.
I personally think the lack of consensus around these is an intentional bit of propaganda that makes it easy to demonize these terms because most people who grew up in capitalist centers of power have been fed a steady diet of red scare propaganda for decades. It’s easy to throw these terms around to scare people into not even exploring the academic thought that devised them.
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
I think the thing to keep in mind is: 1) words evolve over time, and 2) the people using those words might be abbreviating what they actually mean, because they don’t know that there’s another related concept that is named similarly. The best example of the first is how “truck” in the 1910s meant what we now call a “hand truck”, and “car” from that era meant traincar. Whereas in the 2020s, “truck” and “car” both refer to automobiles, and we had to create the backronyns of “hand truck” and “rail car” to avoid confusion.
I don’t think your theoretical understanding of Marxism is wrong – though I’ve not read enough to confirm – but I would hazard against using other people’s wrong definitions and usage guide your own understanding. If you understand the ideology, then it’s a matter of rendering it using the right words; that is, it becomes a communications problem.
I would especially not suggest relying on right-wingers to properly use – let alone understand – left-wing ideology, since their objective is to denigrate leftists through FUD and infantile repetition. Basically, the maxim of “if enough people are ‘talking’ about something, it must be controversial” or “I’m just asking questions bro”, neither of which are anywhere approaching a good-faith discussion on the merits.
How the two use the word “socialism” is almost always understood as a shorthand for what Europeans would call “social democracy”. So it’s definitely on the list of valid implementations of socialism, but is specifically about reforming an openly capitalist system into something more egalitarian. That said, “social democracy” still leaves out a lot of details which need clarification: do Mamdani or Bernie support (re)building the social safety net? Does the state need to also own railroads the same way that they own highways? For the former, there’s the standalone word “welfare state”, but I’m not aware of a compound phrase that means “social democratic welfare state”, if that even describes Bernie or Mamdani at all. I’d certainly love a word that means “social democratic welfare railway state” but nothing has caught on.
I think that should underscore my point: even after resolving exactly which word they might be abbreviating, there aren’t enough short words to succinctly describe any particular ideology. Rather, the words are useful to get a rough idea of a person’s views, but ultimately, every one and every candidate is going to have a slightly different take on certain questions.
I personally refer to this definition as “Stalinist communism”, because it does accurately describe how the USSR was operating under Stalin. Essentially, it wrapped a cult-of-personality in the trappings of communist thought, though people like Trotsky pointed out how communism could be done much differently. Obviously, history is quite clear that the Stalinist approach was not adopted as-is by any other country, nor retained in the USSR after Stalin’s death. Indeed, I’ve never come across anyone who genuinely refers to themselves as a Stalinist or who seriously proposes to the adoption of Stalin-style, top-down authoritarian communism. Maybe some right-wing Russians do, but idk. My point is that, like the Republican examples above, Stalin and authoritarian communism is usually only brought up as a “thought terminating answer” rather than to seriously debate the merits of communism, either theoretically or practically.
Yes, because they’re usually talking past each other about different things. Being able to detect which definition someone means to use is a skill that you can develop for yourself, to have a clearer picture than they do.
I’m primarily writing this comment because I abhor the idea that an idea – it could be anything, from rocket science to theorrtical mathematics – is perceived as being an arena where everyone is just making up stuff, and if that should lead to people becoming turned off the idea of studying it for themselves, that’s a net-negative. No doubt, some countries, politicians, and agencies want to denigrate or prop up their own definitions, but that just makes it easier to identify fake socialists and “communists in name only”.
The merits and failures of socialism and communism deserve to be comprehensively hashed out in the public mind, and it only serves the status quo that this not happen. And the longer the conversation is delayed, the more that the indisputable ails of the status quo take more victims.
thethrilloftime69@feddit.online 6 days ago
First off, I just want to thank you for your thoughtful response. One of the reasons I continue to use Lemmy or Mastodon is because of the actual thoughtful human beings like yourself.
Absolutely so we shouldn’t have to stay married to older definitions.
Part of my motivation for looking into a more precise definition was the desire to truly understand the debate around socialism. And in order to have a proper debate, we need to be able to explain that we mean by certain terms. I think the modern medias failure to properly define these terms for everyone is an intentional strategy to obscure the conversation around socialism and communism.
Exactly. The way our society is structured is to prevent having a real conversation. Tho obviously we both know the reason why they don’t want precise definitions floating around in the public consciousness.